Isabel Alende

Isabel Allende is a Chilean writer and journalist. She is related to Salvador Allende (his niece) and to the politician Isabel Allende. She is one of the best-known Latin American writers.

She was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, where her father, Tomás Allende (a cousin of Salvador Allende, who became President of Chile in 1970 and was killed during the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet), worked in Chile’s diplomatic service. Isabel’s mother, Francisca Llona (“Doña Panchita”), after the family broke up in 1945, returned to Chile with her three children, where she began a new life in her father’s old house in Santiago. In the 1950s the family lived in Bolivia and Beirut. While away from Chile, Isabel continued her education in private schools: in Bolivia at an American school, in Beirut at an English school, and after returning in 1958, she completed it in her native country. Around this same time she met her future husband, then still an engineering student, Miguel Frías. They were married several years later, in 1962. From 1959 to 1965, Isabel built a successful career as a television journalist in the news service of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. On television she hosted a weekly program about the UN anti-hunger program.

In 1963, Paula was born—the daughter to whom Isabel would later dedicate an entire book after her death. The family traveled through Europe, with extended stays in Brussels and Switzerland in 1964–1965, and then returned to Chile, where Isabel and Miguel’s second son, Nicolás, was born.

After returning, Isabel took up active journalistic work: she collaborated with the magazine Paula, where she served on the board of directors and wrote a humorous column. From the early 1970s her writing activity expanded: she wrote for the children’s magazine Mampato, published two children’s stories, “La abuela Panchita” and “Lauchas y lauchones,” as well as the essay collection Civilice a su troglodita.

In 1973, Isabel Allende’s play El Embajador was staged in Santiago de Chile. Soon after this professional success, the aspiring writer was forced to leave the