Allende, Isabel

Isabel Allende was born in Lima, Peru, but she grew up in Chile. Her diplomat father left the family when Isabel was two years old, and her mother had to depend on her own father until she married another diplomat. Allende began to work as a journalist when she was sixteen years old, and between 1970 and 1975 she wrote a string of radio plays. She is the daughter of a cousin of the socialist president Salvador Allende who was assassinated in 1973. Ten years after the military coup she went into exile in Venezuela together with her husband and two children. She later moved to San Francisco.