“I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.”

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.