Meaning & use

Isak Dinesen

proper noun·Advanced

The pen name of Danish author Karen Blixen, best known for the memoir Out of Africa.

See it in a sentence

Isak Dinesen drew on her years running a coffee farm in Kenya to write Out of Africa.

Students studying twentieth-century literature often read short stories by Isak Dinesen.

A note on using this word

Dinesen used a male pen name partly because women writers of her era faced more skepticism from publishers.

Words with a similar meaning

Karen Blixen

Choose a synonym to suit the sentence. Meanings can overlap without being identical.

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