"I am not exaggerating when I say that I have been a feminist since kindergarten", she writes in Women of my soul, addressing taboo topics, such as the relationship with sexuality in old age and that with the other sex.
Born in Lima and living in California,
Isabel Allende
has been enchanting Latin and world audiences for more than forty years with works that talk about women and real life experiences, including historical elements and hints of mythology.
The queen of world fiction blows
out 80 candles today.
The most popular South American writer ever (25 books translated into 42 languages, more than 75 million copies sold), Isabel Allende, a rebel who with the power to create stories made sense of the chaos of events and the traumas that have studded his life.
You have received many international awards and 15 honorary degrees.
In 2014, Obama awarded her the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom.
After the abandonment of her diplomatic father Tomas Allende she experienced exile, the death of her daughter Paula from a rare disease, then that of her mother, her ex-husband William Gordon from whom she separated in 2015. She remarried for the third time at the age of 74 a New York lawyer of his age, and lives in San Francisco with his son.
Pablo Neruda
, which follows the marriage of two Republican refugees fleeing from Spain to France to Chile on a cargo ship with which Neruda saved the lives of more than 2,000 people in 1939.
A theme deeply felt by the writer, who fled from Chile to Venezuela after the coup d'état.
Born in Lima, Peru, in 1942, from an early age she began to imagine the places and characters who would later become the protagonists of her novels: for example the house of her maternal grandfather, where she lives when she moves to Chile with her mother and brothers thanks to the help from his father's cousin, the future president of Chile Salvador Allende.
This place will then be evoked in the writer's first novel, The House of the Spirits, born from a long letter that Isabel wrote to her grandfather, which will also become a film with Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons.
("One cannot find anyone who does not want to be found").
She is a restless child and already a citizen of the world, she moves to Bolivia, Europe and Lebanon, again due to the diplomatic work of her mother's husband.
In 1959 she returns to Chile and three years later she marries Michael Frias, with whom she will have two children,
Paula and Nicolàs.
His intelligence, sharpness and strength emerge from his youth in his work as a journalist.
Through his column in the historic Chilean magazine "Paula" he soon became a courageous and revolutionary figure.
After the Pinochet coup d'etat of 11 September 1973, she moved to Caracas in 1975, and then went to live permanently in the United States, where she met her second husband William Gordon.
From this moment on, she begins the most prolific phase of the writer.
It is the period in which his characteristic style is outlined, which combines journalistic language and magical realism, metaphor and brutality, political and historical responsibility and romanticism and magic, all seasoned with an acute lucidity and a sense of sweet and indulgent humor.
Her work of hers has been classified in the literary movement known as posboom, also defined by some critics as novisima literatura.
Generally her works are or seem autobiographical, but she prefers to call them "memorias", "
Portrait in Sepia (2000), My invented country (2003) and The island under the sea (2009).
Winner of the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2010, Isabel has received many prizes and awards - such as the Malaparte Prize (Capri, 1998), an honorary degree in Trento (2007) and the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for Literature (Denmark, 2011 ).
Portrait in Sepia (2000), My invented country (2003) and The island under the sea (2009).
Winner of the Chilean National Prize for Literature in 2010, Isabel has received many prizes and awards - such as the Malaparte Prize (Capri, 1998), an honorary degree in Trento (2007) and the Hans Christian Andersen Prize for Literature (Denmark, 2011 ).
In recent years, life has taken her in a new and exciting direction: the world of children and young people.
Among the curiosities to note is the one that begins a new book again on January 8, the day in which she wrote the letter to her grandfather who was dying which became the draft for The house of the spirits.
In the novel "Violeta", written during the isolation due to the pandemic, the Chilean writer has come to terms with the figure of her beloved mother "Panchita", born in 1920 in full Spanish and died at 98 years old.
"I came into the world on a stormy Friday in 1920, the year of the plague", the incipit of the narrative.