Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

Winner of the National Book Award

A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Her magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established Isak Dinesen as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize.

With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman's classic work explores Dinesen's life. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been--as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale-- "a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other." Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.

Judith Thurman, critic and biographer, won the National Book Award and two foreign literary prizes for her work. The author of Cleopatra’s Nose, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2007, and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette, she is a staff writer at The New Yorker and lives in New York City.