“My father left when I was three, and I have no memory of him. The most significant male figures in my life were my grandfather, in whose house I lived during the first 10 years of my childhood, and later my stepfather.”

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.