Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American novelist, born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, who writes in Spanish and is best known for her first novel, “The House of the Spirits” (1982). Her fiction often draws on her own life and on historical events, puts women at the centre and sometimes uses elements of magical realism. Her publisher puts her sales at more than eighty million copies across forty-two languages.
Her father was a Chilean diplomat and a first cousin of Salvador Allende, later president of Chile. She grew up in Santiago, Bolivia and Lebanon, worked for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, then joined the staff of the Chilean magazine “Paula” and worked in television. After the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende she fled to Venezuela, where she stayed for 13 years and wrote for the Caracas newspaper “El Nacional”.
“The House of the Spirits” grew out of a letter to her dying grandfather. Several Latin American publishers rejected it before it appeared in Barcelona, and she has kept the habit of starting each new book on 8 January. “Of Love and Shadows” and “Eva Luna” followed. “Paula” (1994) is a memoir written as a letter to her daughter, who died in 1992 after falling into a coma.
“Daughter of Fortune” has a sequel in “Portrait in Sepia”, and “City of the Beasts”, set in the Amazon rainforest, opens a trilogy for young adults. Her later historical novels include “Inés of My Soul”, about Inés Suárez and the founding of Santiago, “Island Beneath the Sea”, set during the Haitian Revolution, and “A Long Petal of the Sea”, which moves from the Spanish Civil War to Chile.
Bille August filmed “The House of the Spirits” in 1993 with Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep, and “Inés of My Soul” became a television miniseries in 2020. Allende received Chile’s National Prize for Literature in 2010 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014. She became a United States citizen in 1993, lives in California, and set up the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996 in memory of her daughter.
Her most recent novel is “My Name Is Emilia del Valle” (2025). She has also written three picture books about a dog called Perla, and “Story Telling: A Writing Life” (2026), a book about the craft of writing.
