Isabel Allende

Although I am Chilean, I was born by chance in Lima. I had a father who disappeared without leaving any memories. My mother was the beacon of my life; perhaps that's why I find it easier to write about women. She gave me a notebook at an age when other little girls were playing with dolls, to record life, thus planting the seed that thirty years later would lead me into literature. Isabel Allende—niece of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was killed in the 1973 coup—was born in 1942, married twice, and has two children and two stepchildren. She worked tirelessly from the age of seventeen, first as a journalist and then as a writer. She describes her work as "realistic literature," influenced both by her incredible childhood and by the magical people and events that sparked her imagination. In addition to her writing, she is actively involved in the defense of human rights. After the death of her daughter in 1992, she founded a foundation in her memory dedicated to the protection and empowerment of women and children worldwide. Since 1987, she has lived with her second husband and their family in California, but as she states, she always has one foot in California and the other in Chile.