The time module can be initialized using seconds since epoch:
>>> import time
>>> t1=time.gmtime(1284286794)
>>> t1
time.struct_time(tm_year=2010, tm_mon=9, tm_mday=12, tm_hour=10, tm_min=19,
tm_sec=54, tm_wday=6, tm_yday=255, tm_isdst=0)
Is there an elegant way to initialize a datetime.datetime object in the same way?
For those that want it ISO 8601 compliant, since the other solutions do not have the T separator nor the time offset (except Meistro's answer):
from datetime import datetime, timezone
result = datetime.fromtimestamp(1463288494, timezone.utc).isoformat('T', 'microseconds')
print(result) # 2016-05-15T05:01:34.000000+00:00
Note, I use fromtimestamp because if I used utcfromtimestamp I would need to chain on .astimezone(...) anyway to get the offset.
If you don't want to go all the way to microseconds you can choose a different unit with the
isoformat() method.