ALLENDE, ISABEL

Lima (Peru), 1942.

By Flávio Aguiar

The recognition of female literary production was consolidated, among others, by Rosario Castellanos and confirmed by the numbers of books sold worldwide by Chilean writer Isabel Allende. Her first book, The House of the Spirits (1982), translated into more than 25 languages, achieved a spread comparable only to that of another Latin American, the Brazilian Paulo Coelho. The military coup of 1973 led her family into exile in Venezuela, where the writer contributed to El Nacional in Caracas as a journalist, an activity she claims is her true vocation. She returned to Chile, now under a democratic government, after fifteen years to receive the Gabriela Mistral Prize.

She also participates in television programs, writes humorous columns, chronicles, theater, and children’s stories, with an incredible variety of themes and styles. She says she learned from Pablo Neruda to use the five senses in writing. Among her published works are Of Love and Shadows (1984), Aphrodite (1997), The Sum of Our Days (2007), The Island Beneath the Sea (2010), Maya’s Notebook (2011), and Ripper (2014).