At 18:00 on November 21, the museum will host a talk entitled The Enlivening Power of Desire. The Danish writer Iselin C. Hermann, author of Express, about a long-distance love affair, will be the special guest.
Hermann has worked as an acrobat, an actress and a director. She started writing only after working as an editor at a book publisher, first producing children's books. Express is her first book for adults and quickly introduced her to an international audience of readers.
Hermann will speak with Judit Kertész, who translated the book into Hungarian and published it. Adél Kováts, a member of the Radnóti Theatre, will read from Hermann's next book, which is soon to be published.
The next literary evening at the museum, on November 28, will focus on the grand dame of Danish literature, Karen Blixen.
Baroness Karen von Blixen-Finecke (1885 -1962), née Karen Dinesen, wrote works both in Danish and in English. She is best known, at least in English, for Out of Africa, her account of living in Kenya, and one of her stories, Babette's Feast, both of which have been adapted into highly acclaimed films.
Blixen, who was the daughter of the writer and army officer Wilhelm Dinesen, was schooled in art in Copenhagen, Paris, and Rome, and started publishing fiction, under a pseudonym, in various Danish periodicals in 1905.
In 1914, she married a distant Swedish cousin, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and the couple moved to Kenya, where they ran a coffee plantation. The Baron was unfaithful and the two separated in 1921 and were divorced in 1925.
Blixen later fell in love with the English big game hunter Denys Finch Hatton, who used her home as a base for his safaris, but Hatton died in an airplane crash in 1931. At the same time, the failure of the coffee plantation forced the abandonment of her beloved farm and her return to Denmark, where she stayed for the rest of her life.
On returning to Denmark Karen Blixen began writing in earnest. Her first book, Seven Gothic Tales, was published in the US in 1934 under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen. Her second book, Out of Africa, was published in 1937. Its success firmly established her reputation as an author.
Judit Kertész, whose Polar Kiadó has published Seven Gothic Tales, will again be a guest at the literary evening, where a documentary film on Blixen's life will be shown.
