Isabel Allende
- Awards And Honors:
- Presidential Medal of Freedom (2014)
- Notable Works:
- “A Long Petal of the Sea”
- “Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses”
- “Daughter of Fortune”
- “Eva Luna”
- “In the Midst of Winter”
- “Inés of My Soul”
- “The Sum of Our Days”
- “Maya’s Notebook”
- “My Invented Country”
- “Of Love and Shadows”
- “Paula”
- “Portrait in Sepia”
- “Ripper”
- “The House of the Spirits”
- “The Infinite Plan”
- “The Japanese Lover”
- “The Soul of a Woman”
- “The Stories of Eva Luna”
Isabel Allende (born August 2, 1942, Lima, Peru) is a Chilean American writer in the magic realist tradition who is considered one of the finest contemporary novelists from Latin America. Her best-known works include The House of the Spirits (1982), Of Love and Shadows (1984), and City of the Beasts (2002).
Background and influences
Allende was born in Peru to Chilean parents. Her father, Tomás Allende, was a diplomat. When she was two years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother, Francisca Llona Barros, then went to live with her maternal grandparents. Allende’s grandmother was an exceptional storyteller, and she left a huge impression on her granddaughter. Allende’s mother married a second time, again to a diplomat, and the family spent several years living in Bolivia and Lebanon before returning to Chile in 1958. The following year Allende began working in Santiago as a secretary for the Food and Agriculture Organization, an agency of the United Nations.
In 1962 she married Miguel Frías (divorced in 1987). They had two children, Paula and Nicolás, and lived in Belgium and Switzerland for a few years before resettling in Chile in 1966. She then worked as a journalist and TV interviewer until she and her family were forced to flee to Venezuela after the assassination (1973) of Chilean Pres. Salvador Allende, her father’s cousin.
Influenced by fellow Latin American novelists Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, and Jorge Luis Borges, Allende also learned from the masterful plots of classic Russian and English novels. She loved mysteries by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle and was so impressed with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) that she rereads the novel every 10 years or so. Allende has also cited feminism and film as important influences on her writing.
The House of the Spirits and literary style
Isabel Allende began writing the letter that became the novel The House of the Spirits on January 8, 1981. Because of its success, she now begins writing all her books on January 8.
In 1981 Allende began writing a letter to her terminally ill grandfather that evolved into her first novel, La casa de los espíritus (The House of the Spirits; film 1993). It was followed by the novels De amor y de sombra (Of Love and Shadows; film 1994), Eva Luna (1987), and El plan infinito (1991; The Infinite Plan) and the collection of stories Cuentos de Eva Luna (1990; The Stories of Eva Luna). All are examples of magic realism, in which realistic fiction is overlaid with elements of fantasy and myth. Allende’s concern in many of these works is the portrayal of South American politics, and her first four works reflect her own experiences and examine the role of women in Latin America. The Infinite Plan, however, is set in the United States, and its protagonist is male.
Other novels and fiction
Allende followed those works of fiction with the novels Hija de la fortuna (1999; Daughter of Fortune), about a Chilean woman who leaves her country for the California gold rush of 1848–49, and Retrato en sepia (2000; Portrait in Sepia), about a woman tracing the roots of her past. El Zorro (2005; Zorro) is a retelling of the well-known legend, and Inés del alma mía (2006; Inés of My Soul; TV miniseries 2020) tells the fictionalized story of Inés Suárez, the mistress of conquistador Pedro de Valdivia. La isla bajo el mar (2009; The Island Beneath the Sea) uses the 1791 slave revolt in Haiti as a backdrop for a story about a mulatto woman who is forced to become her enslaver’s lover after his wife goes mad. El cuaderno de Maya (2011; Maya’s Notebook) takes the form of a teenage girl’s diary, written in the wake of a disastrous episode of drug use and prostitution. In El juego de Ripper (2014; Ripper), Allende tells the story of a teenage girl tracking a serial killer.
Her later novels include El amante japonés (2015; The Japanese Lover), which traces a decades-long love affair between a Polish immigrant and a Japanese American man, and Más allá del invierno (2017; In the Midst of Winter), about the friendships that form after a car accident in Brooklyn, New York, during a blizzard. In Largo pétalo de mar (2019; A Long Petal of the Sea), a man and a woman become exiles following the Spanish Civil War and flee to Chile aboard a refugee ship chartered by poet Pablo Neruda. Allende’s next novel, Violeta (2022), centers on a 100-year-old South American woman who looks back on her eventful life.
In 2025 Allende published Mi nombre es Emilia del Valle (My Name Is Emilia del Valle), a historical novel in which an American journalist of Irish and Chilean descent gains an opportunity to cover a civil war in Chile (1891). While there, she encounters her estranged father and is swept up in the violence of the war.
Allende has also written children’s books, including a trilogy of young adult novels that begins with La ciudad de las bestias (City of the Beasts).
Nonfiction works
Allende’s first nonfiction work, Paula (1994), was written as a letter to her daughter, who died of a hereditary blood disease in 1992. In an interview, Allende said, “That book was written with tears, but those were very healing tears. After it was finished, I felt that my daughter was alive in my heart, her memory preserved. As long as it is written, it will be remembered.”
In the lighthearted Afrodita: cuentos, recetas, y otros afrodisíacos (1997; Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses), Allende shares her personal knowledge of aphrodisiacs and includes family recipes. Mi país inventado (2003; My Invented Country) recounts her self-imposed exile after the September 11, 1973, revolution in Chile and her feelings about her adopted country, the United States—where she has lived since the early 1990s—after the September 11 attacks of 2001. Her later memoirs include La suma de los dias (2007; The Sum of Our Days), about her extended family, and The Soul of a Woman (2021), in which she discusses her development as a feminist.
Charity work and honors
In 1996 Allende used the profits from Paula to fund the Isabel Allende Foundation, which supports nonprofit organizations targeting issues faced by women and girls in Chile and the San Francisco Bay area. She was awarded the Premio Nacional de Literatura (Chilean National Prize in Literature) in 2010, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014, and the PEN Center USA’s lifetime achievement award in 2016.