Isabel Allende
Magic realism — the literary current that weaves the extraordinary into the fabric of ordinary life — found fertile ground in Latin American fiction across the latter half of the twentieth century. Isabel Allende, born in Lima on August 2, 1942, emerged from that tradition as a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, children's writer, and voice actor whose work in Spanish reached readers well beyond the Spanish-speaking world.
A holder of both Chilean and United States citizenship, Allende was educated at Liceo Nº 1 Javiera Carrera. Her fiction spans registers: the novel Zorro reimagines a legendary figure, City of the Beasts extends her storytelling into writing for younger audiences, and A Long Petal of the Sea draws on historical displacement and survival. Across these works, her novels carry the characteristic tensions of magic realism — the grounded and the mythic held in close proximity — while her journalism brought a different discipline to her engagement with language and event.
The recognition Allende has received reflects the breadth of that output. Chile awarded her its National Literature Prize, and the United States conferred upon her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She also received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award, the latter acknowledging her contributions to literature for children and young readers. Together, these honors mark a career whose reach extends across national borders and across audiences of different ages.
Quotes by Isabel Allende
Isabel Allende's insights on:
The imagination is a persistent demon; the world would be black and white without it.
Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compresses to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity.
Memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously.
Accept the children the way we accept trees with gratitude, because they are a blessing, but do not have expectations or desires. You don't expect trees to change, you love them as they are.
If you write nonfiction, a historical account of what really happened, first of all, it's always white men who do that, and you don't have the voices that are really interesting to me, of the people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.
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.
The world starts to exist, for Americans, when we are in conflict with a place. And then all of a sudden, Afghanistan pops up on the TV screen and it becomes a place. And it exists for three weeks, and then it disappears into thin air.
The pain of losing my child was a cleansing experience. I had to throw overboard all excess baggage and keep only what is essential. Because of Paula, I don't cling to anything anymore. Now I like to give much more than to receive.
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.