Died in Nairobi, Kenya

Beryl Markham died on August 3, 1986, in Nairobi, Kenya, at the age of 83. In her final years, she lived modestly near the Nairobi racecourse, largely supported by admirers and royalties that flowed in after the 1983 rediscovery and republication of her memoir West with the Night, originally published in 1942.

Having spent decades in relative obscurity following the decline of her horse-training career, Markham experienced an unexpected late-life renaissance when literary figures, including Ernest Hemingway (who had praised her writing in private correspondence decades earlier), were credited with reviving interest in her prose. The book's rerelease introduced her remarkable life — as record-setting aviatrix, celebrated racehorse trainer, and vivid memoirist of colonial Kenya — to a new generation of readers.

She died having witnessed this revival of her legacy, returning to Kenya's racing circuit as an honored, if impoverished, elder of East African aviation and horse racing. She was buried in the Langata Cemetery in Nairobi, close to the landscapes and communities that had shaped her extraordinary life. Her death closed a chapter on one of the twentieth century's most singular women: a trailblazer who broke barriers in male-dominated fields of horse training and aviation and left behind a literary work still celebrated for its lyrical evocation of Africa.