Allende, Isabel

Allende, Isabel (1942- ), Chilean novelist and journalist, born in Lima, Peru, where her father was a diplomat. She attended private schools and travelled before returning to Santiago, Chile, to finish her schooling and to work at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. She then worked as a journalist, writing articles on provocative topics, in television, and in films.

Allende was exiled from Chile in 1973 and sought refuge in Caracas, Venezuela, when her uncle Salvador Allende, president of Chile, died during a military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

In exile, she produced her first novel, La Casa de los Espíritus (1982; The House of the Spirits, 1985), a family chronicle set against the turmoil of political and economic change in Latin America. It was well received by critics, who saw resemblances in the book to the “magic realist” technique (a blending of the real and the supernatural), which is found in the works of the Latin American novelist and Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez. The book has been made into a film by Danish director Bille August. Allende continued her exploration of personal and political themes in two subsequent novels, De Amor y de Sombra (1984; Of Love and Shadows, 1987) and Eva Luna (1987), and a collection of stories, Cuentos de Eva Luna (1989; The Stories of Eva Luna, 1991).

In 1995 she published Paula, an autobiographical account of her relationship with her daughter; the work is in the form of a letter to her daughter, who was in a coma. Allende is one of the first Latin American woman writers to win worldwide recognition and popularity. Her exile ended in 1988 when the Chileans rejected another term for Pinochet and elected a democratic president. Her most recent works include Aphrodite (1997), a personal look at the intertwined sensual arts of food and love, Daughter of Fortune (1999), a historical novel about the Gold Rush in California, and Portrait in Sepia (2000), a typically exuberant family saga set in late 19th-century Chile. In 2002 she published the magic realist adventure for young adults, City of the Beasts and in 2003 the memoir My Invented Country, about her native Chile.