“In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: 'No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.' My husband is a writer of crime novels. His name is William Gordon. And so I had to accommodate to his style because that's what he writes. So we decided we'd give it a try. Well, we almost divorced.”

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.