Karen Blixen is where the story of Blix begins. The Danish writer, also known by her pen name Isak Dinesen, travelled to Kenya in 1914 and spent seventeen formative years living beneath the Ngong Hills, where she managed a coffee farm and built relationships that would shape the rest of her life.
Those years became the inspiration for Out of Africa, her celebrated memoir of landscape, friendship, love, loss and belonging. Through people such as Farah, Kamante, Berkeley Cole, Bror Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, her story became inseparable from the people she encountered and the Africa she remembered.
After returning to Denmark in 1931, Blixen transformed those experiences into literature, ensuring that the people, places and stories of her African years would travel far beyond her farm in Kenya.
The Karen Blixen Room is the heart of the story at Blix Inn, our boutique guesthouse in Stellenbosch. It honours a remarkable storyteller, an independent spirit and the enduring connection to Africa that inspired the world of Blix.
