Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American author widely regarded as one of the most important Latin American writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the world's most widely read Spanish-language female author. Born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, she grew up in Chile and was a journalist before the 1973 coup that overthrew her cousin, President Salvador Allende, forced her into exile in Venezuela. Allende began writing fiction in exile. Her debut novel The House of the Spirits (1982) became an international sensation—a sweeping multigenerational saga of a Chilean family set against the backdrop of political upheaval, widely celebrated for its magical realist narrative and its political power. Her subsequent novels include Of Love and Shadows (1984), Eva Luna (1987), The Infinite Plan (1991), and Daughter of Fortune (1999). She has also written memoirs, including Paula (1994), an elegy for her daughter who died of a rare illness. Allende received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2018, the Chilean National Literature Prize, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, among many other honours. She is a US citizen and lives in Marin County, California.