50 Fun Facts About Isabel Allende

Isabel Allende's novels are most often associated with which literary style?

Magical realism, a label she accepts only in part: she calls it overwhelmingly present in The House of the Spirits but says it is missing from several of her later books.

Allende's The House of the Spirits began as a farewell to which dying relative?

Her grandfather: exiled and unable to return to Chile as he lay dying at 99, she wrote to tell him he could go in peace because she remembered everything he had told her.

Isabel Allende was born in which foreign capital?

Lima: her father was a Chilean diplomat stationed in Peru, but the marriage was over by 1945, and her mother took the three small children home to Chile.

Isabel Allende is often called Salvador Allende's niece, but her father Tomás was actually his what?

First cousin: the president was also her godfather and she saw him at weekends, yet she says he shaped her life mostly through his death, when the 1973 coup drove her into exile.

After the 1973 coup, Allende fled Chile and spent 13 years in exile in which country?

Venezuela: she left Chile for it in 1975 and stayed 13 years, and she says she would never have become a writer had the coup not forced her to leave everything and start again.

Which general led the 1973 coup that sent Isabel Allende into exile?

Augusto Pinochet's coup made her surname dangerous: she helped find safe passage for people on the wanted lists until she was blacklisted and receiving death threats herself.

Allende's novel Island Beneath the Sea opens on a sugar plantation in what is now which country?

Haiti, then the French colony of Saint-Domingue: the enslaved Zarité escapes its slave revolution by following her master to New Orleans, where she forges a new life.

As a young translator of romance novels, Allende made a habit of doing what?

Rewriting the heroines' dialogue: she made them sound smarter and changed the endings too, later saying of her Barbara Cartland translations, "I couldn't resist making improvements."

Isabel Allende sets aside 8 January for which ritual?

Starting a new book: she began her first novel on 8 January 1981, and it did so well that she kept the date, at first out of superstition and later, she says, as discipline.

Which US president awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom?

Barack Obama presented it in 2014, singling her out among honourees who had overcome hardship as a novelist exiled by Chile's military government; Stevie Wonder was honoured the same day.

Allende's memoir Paula takes the form of what?

A letter: she began it at Paula's hospital bedside to fill in the gaps for her daughter when she woke, and kept writing after she understood that Paula never would.

Which disease caused the coma from which Allende's daughter Paula never recovered?

Porphyria is a rare genetic condition that is seldom fatal: Allende says neglect in a Spanish intensive care unit caused Paula's brain damage, and she nursed her at home in California until she died.

In 1996 Allende founded a foundation in her daughter's honour dedicated to the rights of whom?

Women and children: the foundation carries on the work of Paula herself, who was volunteering with poor children at a school in Madrid when she fell ill.

Roughly how many copies had Isabel Allende's books sold worldwide by 2025?

About 80 million, in more than 40 languages: she has been called the world's most widely read Spanish-language author, though she published no novel until she was almost 40.

Which family does The House of the Spirits follow?

The Truebas borrow from Allende's own family: their matriarch is modelled on her grandmother, who held séances and experimented with telepathy because, Allende says, "she didn't trust the mail".

In The House of the Spirits, which character has paranormal powers and keeps a detailed diary?

Clara stops speaking for nine years after seeing her sister's autopsy, and decades later her diaries are what let her granddaughter piece the family's story together.

What is the name of Esteban's hacienda in The House of the Spirits?

Las Tres Marías becomes a model estate through reward and intimidation, but the grandson of a peasant woman Esteban rapes there returns decades later to torture his granddaughter.

In The House of the Spirits, which foreman's son grows up with Esteban's daughter and becomes her lover?

Pedro Tercero is banished from the hacienda for stirring up the tenants with his revolutionary songs, and when Esteban later hunts him down he hacks off several of the young man's fingers.

In The House of the Spirits, Esteban's sister Férula curses him to die like what?

A dog: Férula hurls the curse as Esteban throws her out of his house, and it half comes true, for he shrinks with age, yet he dies at peace beside his granddaughter.

The House of the Spirits was first published in 1982 in which Spanish city?

Barcelona: Plaza & Janés published it there, and it became a bestseller in Spain and West Germany, where the unknown exile was named Author of the Year within two years.

The House of the Spirits is often said to be influenced by which novel?

One Hundred Years of Solitude: many critics read Allende's saga as García Márquez's family epic retold from the women's side, and she names him first among her influences.

Who played Esteban in the 1993 film of The House of the Spirits?

Jeremy Irons starred for the Danish director Bille August, who shot most of the film in Denmark; Allende said it lost the book's humour and "had a Scandinavian gloom".

Which actress played the clairvoyant matriarch in the 1993 film of The House of the Spirits?

Meryl Streep shared the part with her own daughter: Grace Gummer, then a small child and billed under another name, played the character as a girl.

In 2012 Allende won a literature award named for which fairy-tale writer?

Hans Christian Andersen: the prize honours writers whose work recalls his, and Allende says she grew up on his unsettling tales, told at bedtime by her mother after her father walked out.

Eva Luna, the heroine of Allende's 1987 novel, is famous for what gift?

Storytelling: the gift carries the orphaned Eva from servant to writer, and in Allende's follow-up, The Stories of Eva Luna, she tells tale after tale to her lover like a modern Scheherazade.

Allende's The Wind Knows My Name pairs a boy who fled Nazi Vienna with a girl detained alone at which border?

US–Mexico: seven-year-old Anita, who fled El Salvador, is separated from her mother in Arizona, eight decades after Samuel boarded a Kindertransport train alone with little but his violin.

In Eva Luna, Eva is conceived when her mother comforts a man who seems to be dying of what?

A snakebite: the man recovers after all, and it is Eva's mother who dies first, choking on a chicken bone.

City of the Beasts, Allende's first young-adult novel, is set where?

The Amazon rainforest: with his mother gravely ill, 15-year-old Alex is packed off there with his grandmother's magazine expedition, which is hunting a creature called the Beast.

In City of the Beasts, Alexander Cold's grandmother Kate writes for which magazine?

International Geographic mounts an expedition to track a legendary creature and sends its fearless reporter Kate Cold, who takes her 15-year-old grandson along while his mother is ill.

Which animal is revealed to be Alexander Cold's totem in City of the Beasts?

A black jaguar: after Alex's strange encounter with a caged one, his friend Nadia starts calling him Jaguar, and the two go on to be renamed for their totems, Jaguar and Eagle.

Allende's 2005 novel Zorro imagines the youth of which swashbuckling hero?

Diego de la Vega gets a childhood here: Allende makes him the son of a Spanish officer and a Native American warrior, which is why her hero grows up siding with California's dispossessed.

In Allende's Zorro, the hero's fencing master in Spain recruits him into which secret society?

La Justicia is sworn to defend the poor and powerless, and it is inside this secret society, in Allende's telling, that the young swordsman first takes the name Zorro.

In Allende's Zorro, what is the spirit guide of the hero's friend Bernardo?

A horse: Bernardo finds his guide in the same rite of passage in which his friend meets a fox, zorro in Spanish, the animal that gives the hero his name.

Which TV host's book club picked Allende's Daughter of Fortune?

Oprah Winfrey chose it in February 2000 and had Allende on her show to discuss it, and the novel went on to the American bestseller lists.

In Daughter of Fortune, Eliza Sommers follows her lover from Chile to where?

Gold-rush California: Eliza stows away in a ship's hold with the help of the Chinese doctor Tao Chi'en, and her hunt for her lover turns into a hunt for her own freedom.

Which novel is the sequel to Daughter of Fortune?

Portrait in Sepia follows Eliza's granddaughter Aurora, tormented by nightmares, as she digs for the first five years of her life, which a trauma wiped from her memory.

A Long Petal of the Sea opens during which conflict?

The Spanish Civil War: when Franco wins, a pregnant widow and an army doctor flee over the mountains to France, then marry without love to win passage to a new life in Chile.

In A Long Petal of the Sea, which real poet charters the refugee ship Winnipeg?

Pablo Neruda really did charter the Winnipeg, which carried some 2,000 refugees to Chile; decades later he told a young reporter named Isabel Allende to give up journalism and write novels.

The Japanese Lover's wartime love story begins in a mansion in which city?

San Francisco: eight-year-old Alma is sent there from Poland in 1939, and seven decades later, in a Bay Area retirement home, a trail of mysterious gifts reveals the love she hid all her life.

In The Japanese Lover, Alma's love Ichimei Fukuda is the son of whom?

Her uncle's gardener: the two grow up together on the family estate until Pearl Harbor, when Ichimei's family is sent to an internment camp, and they go on meeting in secret for decades.

Inés of My Soul narrates the life of Inés Suárez and her role in founding which city?

Santiago: Allende's Inés, a seamstress, sails to the New World to look for her husband, learns he is dead, and goes on to found a capital with her lover Pedro de Valdivia.

Allende's novel Violeta frames its heroine's hundred-year life between two what?

Pandemics: Violeta is born as the Spanish flu reaches South America in 1920 and tells her whole story a century later, writing to her grandson as the coronavirus closes in.

Who starred opposite Jennifer Connelly in the 1994 film Of Love and Shadows?

Antonio Banderas plays an underground photographer who draws a magazine reporter into exposing the regime's crimes; a year earlier he had appeared in the film of Allende's first novel too.

At the 2006 Winter Olympics opening ceremony, Allende carried the Olympic flag beside which Italian screen legend?

Sophia Loren walked just ahead of her among the eight women who carried the flag in Turin; Allende joked that those four minutes made her more famous than 25 years of writing books.

Which Chilean writer dismissed Allende as no writer at all, only an "escribidora"?

Roberto Bolaño also called her, simply, a bad writer; Allende's answer is that treating a bestselling author as unserious "is a great insult to the readership".

Before writing books, Allende worked for which United Nations agency?

The Food and Agriculture Organization took her on as a secretary at 17, straight out of school; she had worked for more than twenty years before she began her first novel.

In 1967 Allende joined the founding staff of Paula, a Chilean magazine of what kind?

Feminist: Paula took on abortion and divorce in Catholic Chile, and Allende's humorous articles from those years were collected as Civilise Your Caveman.

Allende jokes that she married her second husband, a California lawyer, to get what?

His life story: she says his life "was a novel", so she married the man to get the story, and it became The Infinite Plan, her first novel set in the United States.

As a child in the 1950s, Allende attended schools in La Paz and which Middle Eastern city?

Beirut: her diplomat stepfather was posted to Lebanon, where she attended an English private school until unrest in the region sent her home to Chile at 15.

Which Allende novel alternates between Berkeley, California, and the Chilean island of Chiloé?

Maya's Notebook: with Las Vegas gangsters and the FBI on her trail, a Berkeley teenager is sent by her Chilean grandmother to hide on the remote island, where she keeps the diary of the title.