Isabel Allende

‘When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten, I am not exaggerating,’ begins Isabel Allende her new book. Ever since childhood, she was adamant to provide for herself. Now she is world-famous, the diplomate’s daughter who became the first Latin-American woman to reach an audience of hundreds of millions of readers. With her love stories and historical novels, she introduced her readers to South America, the complex, enchanting continent that is so tied up with her personal history. Allende was born in 1942 in Peru, from Chilean parents. After the military coup in Chili in 1973, during which her uncle, president Salvador Allende was murdered, she relocated to Venezuela.

In ‘The soul of a woman’ the author, today based in California, explores the central role of feminism in her life. When she was in her twenties, during the first wave of feminism, she worked for a Chilean feminist magazine, where she ‘sharpened her pen to defy the male establishment’. In her new book, she pays homage to the important women in her life, including her mother Panchita and daughter Paula, but also to authors such as Virginia Woolf and Margaret Atwood, who inspired her to fight for women’s rights. She writes passionately, but not without irony and a sense of humor, about topics as varied as #metoo, aging, the pandemic, and romantic love. Allende: ‘I don’t have to please men anymore’.

Get the book 'The Soul of a Woman' (‘Wat wij willen').