translated from Spanish: The writer Isabel Allende celebrates her 79th birthday today

The Chilean writer naturalized American with more than 72 million books sold, Isabel Allende, turns 79 today after a long career as a journalist and writer. Born in Lima, Peru, to Chilean parents, she settled in San Francisco, United States, in 1988 when she decided to become a naturalized citizen. Niece of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by the dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet in 1973, she went into exile in Venezuela until her U.S. residence became a reality. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2004. He won the National Prize for Literature of his country in 2010. Author of bestsellers, the total circulation of her books reaches 65 million copies and her works have been translated into 35 languages. His first novel, and the best known, “The House of the Spirits,” was born from a letter he had begun writing to his grandfather in 1981, when he was 99 years old and on the verge of death. Later, it was adapted both into a film with the same title by Bille August and into the theatre. The second novel, De amor y de sombra (1984) also became another great success and was also brought to the big screen in 1994 by Venezuelan filmmaker Betty Kaplan. In both novels he addresses the theme of dictatorship. Her daughter Paula died in 1992, at the age of 28, from a porphyria that left her in a coma in a clinic in Madrid. The painful experience prompted her to write Paula, an epistolary autobiographical book published in 1994 where she recounts how her childhood and youth were until she reached the time of exile. Two years later, she founded The Isabel Allende Foundation, in honor of her daughter, who had volunteered in marginalized communities (in Venezuela and Spain) as an educator and psychologist. In September 2010, she was awarded the Chilean National Prize for Literature for “the excellence and contribution of her work to literature, which has attracted attention in Chile and abroad, and has also been recognized by multiple distinctions and has revalued the role of the reader”. The following year, she received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for her qualities as a magical storyteller and her talent for “bewitching” the public, succeeding another woman, the British J.K. Rowling, who won the first edition of this award that since 2010 is given in Odense, hometown of the famous Danish writer. His life came into a miniseries
“Isabel: the intimate story of the writer Isabel Allende” is a Chilean miniseries available on Amazon Prime Video that tells the life of the most widely read Spanish-language author in the world. The interesting thing about the production is that the axis is not the art of writing, but the cinematic episodes of the life of the Chilean writer, which made her someone with a great story to tell outside of her texts. Isabel Allende’s life has many condiments and did not need to be sweetened: her beginnings in a feminist magazine, her exile due to the pressure of the military, her failures and the confrontation with the illness of her daughter Paula. The episodes are chained together and lead her naturally to her passion for writing. 

Original source in Spanish