Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American novelist, born in Lima in 1942, who writes in Spanish. A journalist in Chile until the 1973 coup, she spent thirteen years of exile in Venezuela, where she wrote “The House of the Spirits” (1982), a four-generation family chronicle that grew out of a letter to her dying grandfather. Among her later books are “Of Love and Shadows” (1984), “Eva Luna” (1987) and “Paula” (1994), written at her daughter's bedside. She received Chile's National Literature Prize in 2010 and the American Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.