Isabel Allende

Biography

Isabel Allende (born 1942 in Lima, raised in Chile) is the niece of Salvador Allende, the socialist president overthrown and killed in the 1973 coup. She fled Chile after the coup, living in exile in Venezuela. The House of the Spirits began as a letter to her dying grandfather — she kept writing until it became a novel. The book was rejected by every Spanish-language publisher she approached; it was finally published in Spain in 1982 and became an international sensation. Allende has said that writing is an act of memory against forgetting, and that the novel is her testimony to what happened in Chile.

Isabel Allende at a glance