On January 8, 1981, Isabel Allende received a phone call from Chile at her home in Caracas: her grandfather was on his deathbed. She was living in exile and could not return to the country to say goodbye to the man who had been such an important presence in her life. That very night, she decided to write him a letter.

As if in a trance, she threw herself frantically into writing. She spent entire nights awake, until exhaustion overcame her. She continued writing even after her grandfather’s death, and by the end of that year, she had written 500 pages. The letter was no longer a letter: it had become her first novel, *The House of the Spirits*.

That was the starting point of a career that made Isabel Allende one of the most widely read Spanish-language authors in the world. A winner of the National Prize for Literature and the author of books translated into 42 languages, she has brought a part of Chilean history and culture to readers around the globe.

Sources: Isabel Allende's official website, Simon & Schuster.

We are Isabel Allende.
We are Chile.