Isabel Allende

Chilean-American · born 1942

Born Isabel Angélica Allende Llona on August 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru, where her father was a Chilean diplomat and first cousin to the future president Salvador Allende, she was three years old when her father abandoned the family and her mother Francisca carried her three children home to Santiago. A second marriage to the diplomat Ramón Huidobro moved them through Bolivia and Lebanon, where Isabel attended a private American school in La Paz and an English school in Beirut, before they returned to Chile in 1958. She read widely as a teenager, particularly Shakespeare, and began work as a journalist on the editorial staff of the feminist magazine Paula in 1967 and as editor of the children's magazine Mampato in 1969. She was working in Santiago as a columnist and television interviewer on September 11, 1973, when her father's cousin was overthrown by General Pinochet and shot dead in La Moneda Palace. She helped wanted dissidents reach safe houses until her own name appeared on the lists, then fled with her family to Caracas in 1975. There, beginning a letter to her dying grandfather on January 8, 1981, she found the letter becoming the novel La casa de los espíritus, The House of the Spirits (1982), a three-generation saga of the fictional Trueba family that quickly made her the most-read Spanish-language novelist alive. Of Love and Shadows (1984), Eva Luna (1987), and Paula (1994), her grief-stricken memoir of the daughter she lost at twenty-eight, followed. She has begun every book on January 8 since. She received Chile's National Literature Prize in 2010, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and lives in California with her third husband, Roger Cukras.