Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American writer, born in Lima, Peru, on August 2, 1942, and raised in Chile. She worked as a journalist there until the 1973 military coup sent her into exile in Venezuela. In 1981, in Caracas, she began a letter to her dying grandfather. It became her first novel, The House of the Spirits (1982). Her books have since been translated into more than 42 languages and have sold more than 77 million copies.
Her novels include Eva Luna, Daughter of Fortune, Inés of My Soul, A Long Petal of the Sea, Violeta, The Wind Knows My Name and My Name Is Emilia del Valle (2025). Paula (1994), the memoir she wrote for her daughter, who died in 1992, led her to start the Isabel Allende Foundation in 1996, which supports the rights of women and children. Her honours include Chile’s National Prize for Literature (2010), the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom (2014) and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2018).
Forty-four years after that first novel, she went back to it. On October 15, 2026, she won the Premio Planeta for La hora antes del alba, the sequel to The House of the Spirits, which follows Clara’s granddaughter Alba. Earlier in 2026 she published La palabra mágica. Una vida escrita, a book about her life in writing. She lives in Sausalito, California.
Photo: Lesekreis / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), cropped.
