“Fear is like a black cavern that is terrifying. Once you enter the cavern and explore it, you realize that you can get out of it, go through it and get out of it.”

Chilean-American writer

Isabel Allende is a Chilean-American writer known for her fiction and for novels that often use elements of magical realism. Her work includes The House of the Spirits and City of the Beasts, both of which found wide commercial success. She has been described as the world’s most widely read Spanish-language author. In 2004, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She later received Chile’s National Literature Prize in 2010 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.