Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende (1942- ), Chilean novelist and journalist, who from the 1980s became renowned as one of the first Latin American woman writers to win worldwide recognition and popularity.

Isabel Allende was born on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru, where her father was a diplomat. Having attended private schools and travelled, she returned to Santiago, Chile, to finish her schooling and to work at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. She then worked as a journalist and in television. Allende was exiled from Chile in 1973 and sought refuge in Caracas, Venezuela, when her uncle Salvador Allende, president of Chile, died during a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

In exile, Isabel Allende produced her first novel, La Casa de los Espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits, 1985), a family chronicle set against the turmoil of political and economic change in Latin America. It was well received by critics, who saw resemblances in the book to the “magic realist” technique (a blending of the real and the supernatural), which is found in the works of the Latin American novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. The book was made into a film by Danish director Bille August in 1993. Allende continued her exploration of personal and political themes in two subsequent novels, De Amor y de Sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows, 1987) and Eva Luna (1987; trans. 1988), and a collection of stories, Los Cuentos de Eva Luna (1989; The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991). Her exile ended in 1988 when the Chileans rejected another term for Pinochet and elected a democratic president.

In 1994 Isabel Allende published Paula (trans. 1995), an autobiographical account of her relationship with her daughter; the work is in the form of a letter to her daughter, who fell into a coma and died in 1992. She then published Afrodita: Cuentos, Recetas, y Otros Afrodisíacos (1997; Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses, 1998), a personal look at the intertwined sensual arts of food and love; Hija de la Fortuna (1999; Daughter of Fortune), a historical novel about the Gold Rush in California; and Retrato en Sepia (2000; Portrait in Sepia), a typically exuberant family saga set in late 19th-century Chile. La Ciudad de las Bestias (2002; City of the Beasts), a magic realist adventure for young adults, was followed in 2003 by the memoir Mi País Inventado (My Invented Country), about her native Chile. Among her later works are Zorro (2005), Inés del Alma Mía (2006; Inés of My Soul, 2007), and a further memoir La Suma de Los Dias (2007; The Sum of Our Days, 2008). Allende became an American citizen in 2003.