Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende (born 1942) is a Chilean-American novelist, author of The House of the Spirits (1982), whose books have been translated into more than 42 languages and sold over 77 million copies.

Isabel Angélica Allende Llona was born in Lima, Peru, on 2 August 1942. Her father, Tomás Allende, was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, President of Chile from 1970 to 1973. After Augusto Pinochet's coup in 1973 she was placed on a wanted list and fled to Venezuela, where she lived for 13 years and wrote for the newspaper El Nacional. She moved to California in 1989 and became a US citizen in 1993.

Her first novel, La casa de los espíritus, was turned down by several publishers before Plaza & Janés issued it in Barcelona in 1982. Later books include Eva Luna (1987), the memoir Paula (1994), written for her daughter who died in 1992, Daughter of Fortune (1999) and Zorro (2005). She received Chile's National Prize for Literature in 2010 and the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.

For collectors. The true first edition of her debut is the Spanish-language Plaza & Janés edition (Barcelona, 1982; ISBN 84-01-38011-1). Magda Bogin's English translation, The House of the Spirits, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on 12 April 1985 (ISBN 0-394-53907-9), and the first UK edition followed from Jonathan Cape in London on 4 July 1985 (ISBN 0-224-02231-8).