Portrait in Sepia

Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, in 1942 and raised in Chile, Bolivia, Europe, and the Middle East, as her peripatetic family followed her stepfather's diplomatic career. She worked as a journalist in Chile until the 1973 military coup. Afterwards Allende fled her home and settled in Venezuela with her husband, son and daughter. She now lives in the San Francisco area with her American husband and their respective extended families.

Isabel Allende took the literary world by storm with the publication of "The House of the Spirits", a novel which chronicled four generations of a Chilean family against the backdrop of Chile's brutal history. The Times of London heralded Allende as having "the rare ability to blend fantasy and legend with political fact and a well-plotted narrative to produce an enchanted world unlike anything else in contemporary fiction." The New York Times called the book "a unique achievement, both personal witness and possible allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America."

“The world’s most widely read Spanish-language author”, Isabel Allende is now synonymous with the spiritual universe ofLatin America. A writer who has invested so much fantasy and imagination to narrate and describe the inimitable beauty of a continent that still remains an indecipherable enigma to the Western civilization, she has enchanted a couple of generations of readers. “The House of the Spirits” (1982) is a pivotal literary work, a chronology of one of the most mesmerizing family epics that aesthetically fuses the political, the sentimental and the transcendental. Isabel Allende was awarded the most prestigious literary prize of Chile, her native country, - Chilean National Prize for Literature. With the 18 published novels translated into more than 30 languages, her talent has marked indelibly the artistic world of the past 30 years.