Isabel Allende
(b. 1942)

Isabel Allende created quite a stir in the literary world when her first book, The House of the Spirits, was published in 1982. The story, she later explained, had just poured out of her. Begun as a letter to her dying grandfather, it had turned into a journal and then into an extraordinary book, without any forethought or planning.

This spirit of spontaneous creation is characteristic of Allende's work, where strange things happen and the supernatural fuses with the realistic in a style called magical realism. Allende cites a diverse group of writers as literary influences: fellow magical realist Gabriel García Márquez, poet Pablo Neruda, William Shakespeare, and even certain writers of science fiction.

In her works of fiction and autobiography, Allende has explored such themes as the bonds between family members, people's relationship with the past, and the presence of magic and spiritualism in everyday life. Allende says of her writing, "I write to understand my circumstances, to sort out the confusion of reality, to exorcise my demons. But most of all, I write because I love it! If I didn't write my soul would dry up and die …."

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