Isabel Allende

Isabel Angelica Allende Llona is a Chilean-American writer whose novels, including The House of the Spirits (1982) and City of the Beasts (2002), sometimes carry aspects of the magical realism genre and have been commercially successful; she has been called the world's most widely read Spanish-language author. Her novels are often based on her personal experience and historical events and pay homage to the lives of women, weaving together elements of myth and realism. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004, received Chile's National Literature Prize in 2010, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2014.