Do we like Isabel Allende?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decades of feminism, a women's foundation and plain speaking for migrants, with only a spat over a prize and thin sourcing on trans issues keeping her off a 9.
Isabel Allende was born in Lima in 1942 and raised in Chile after her diplomat father left the family. She is the goddaughter of Salvador Allende, the president who was her father's cousin. After Pinochet's 1973 coup she fled Chile in 1975 and spent 13 years in exile in Venezuela, which shaped everything she has written since.
The trophy shelf is long: Chile's National Prize for Literature in 2010, then the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2014. She has sold tens of millions of books, and she calls herself “an eternal foreigner”, a line she has leaned on across her immigrant years in the US.
The only stoush we found is over her latest win. Mexican writer Dahlia de la Cerda argued she crossed an ethical line by entering a rival publisher's contest after years with Penguin Random House. Others called the prize commercial and politically pitched, and Penguin Random House said it respected authors' decisions and wished her well. That is a gripe about industry etiquette, not about how she treats people.
On the harm check, she comes out well. She has described herself as a feminist from childhood and says that anger at male dominance became activism in her twenties. In 2025 she said US migrant detention centres, which authorities call detention, were “de concentración”, and described ICE as acting like “una policía secreta prácticamente”. Where you land on that comparison depends on how you read the policy, but it is her own, on-the-record stand for migrants. We found no words from her against LGBTQ+ people, and honestly not much specific on trans rights either, so that part is a gap rather than a tick.
The recent news is a big one. Aged 84, she took the Planeta in Barcelona from the king and queen with a book that follows Alba, a character who survives torture under a dictatorship. In her speech she said that seeing democracies threatened gave her the same fear that made her leave Chile in 1973. Whatever you think of the jury, the message was consistent with the person she has been for decades.
The real good stuff is her foundation. It was started with earnings from her memoir “Paula” and supports women and girls worldwide, including groups helping women and children separated at the US border and survivors of human trafficking. Its stated focus is economic and social justice for women.