Isabel Allende, a Chilean author, became internationally famous for her novels set in modern Chile, for her historical fiction, and for her autobiographical writings.
© Tiziana Fabi, AFP/Getty Images

People in the United States observe National Hispanic Heritage Month each year from September 15 to October 15. During this period, many Latin American countries celebrate their independence. These countries include Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Nicaragua.

Isabel Allende is one of the leading novelists and journalists in Chile. Her novels and short stories, which were first published in the 1980′s, have won her international fame and several literary awards.

Allende was a journalist and television reporter in Chile in the 1960′s before joining the staff of the women’s magazine Paula in 1967. In 1970, her cousin and godfather, Salvador Allende Gossens, a socialist politician, was democratically elected president of Chile. In September 1973, Salvador Allende was overthrown and died during a right-wing military coup led by army general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. The Allende family fled Chile, and Isabel moved to Venezuela, where she worked as a journalist. In 1983, she moved to the United States, where she held various university teaching posts while still pursuing her literary career.

Allende’s first novel, The House of Spirits (1982), is a direct reflection of her experiences in Chile during the time of the Pinochet coup and her later separation from her family. The novel arose out of a letter she wrote during 1981 to her dying grandfather, who had stayed in Chile. The letter recounted all the memories she had that would keep the old man alive for her. The House of Spirits became a best seller, and Allende won great critical acclaim. Her work was compared with that of the eminent Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez.

Latin American writers have composed many classics of modern world literature. They include the novels One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, The House of the Spirits by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende, and the short story collection Ficciones by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Translated by Gregory Rabassa. English translation © 1970 by Harper & Row. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins); The House of the Spirits (Penguin Random House); Ficciones (Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial)

Allende’s other works, also steeped in Chile’s turbulent history, include two more novels, Of Love and Shadows (1984) and Eva Luna (1989); and the short story collections Tales of Eva Luna (1990) and The Infinite Plan (1992). Daughter of Fortune (2000) is a historical romance about a Chilean-born woman searching for her lover in California during the 1849 gold rush. Portrait in Sepia (2001) is a family chronicle set in Chile and California from 1862 to 1910. It draws on characters from The House of Spirits and Daughter of Fortune.

Allende’s historical novel Zorro (2005) portrays a dashing hero in California during the early 1800′s. Another historical novel, Inés of My Soul (2006), is set during the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire in South America during the 1530′s. Her novel Island Beneath the Sea (2010) portrays a revolt of enslaved people in Haiti. In the novel Maya’s Notebook (2013), a young woman flees to a remote island off the coast of Chile to escape from pursuing assassins and law enforcement agents. Ripper (2014) is a mystery novel that features a child detective. The Japanese Lover (2015) is a love story about a Polish-born woman and her one-time Japanese gardener over a period of 70 years of modern history. In the Midst of Winter (2017) deals with three troubled characters with roots in Latin America whose lives intermingle starting with their unexpected meeting in Brooklyn, New York, in the United States. Long Petal of the Sea (2020) tells a story about refugees who flee to Chile to escape the Spanish civil war during the 1930’s.

Allende wrote Paula (1995) in the form of a letter to her daughter, Paula, who was dying of an inherited blood disease. She also wrote a children’s story, La Gorda de Porcelana (The Porcelain Fat Lady) (1984). For young adults, she wrote the trilogy of novels City of the Beasts (2002), Kingdom of the Golden Dragon (2004), and Forest of the Pygmies (2005). In 1997, Allende completed Afrodita: cuentos, recetas y otros afrodisíacos (translated as Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses), a nonfiction collection of writing about the history of love potions, which also included recipes. Allende wrote a memoir called My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Trip Through Chile (2003), as well as the related memoir The Sum of Our Days (2008). She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of the highest civilian honors in the United States, in 2014.

Isabel Allende was born on Aug. 2, 1942, in Lima, Peru, where her father was a diplomat. Following the divorce of her parents, her mother took her back to live in Chile, where she lived from the age of 3 until their exile to Venezuela in 1973.

April 17, 2019

The winners of the 103rd Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, April 15, by Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. The awards are given in the United States each year for distinguished achievement in journalism, literature, drama, and music.

Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, established the Pulitzer Prizes in 1917. Credit: © Hulton Archives/Getty Images

The public service prize in 2019 went to the South Florida Sun Sentinel for exposing failings by school and law enforcement officials before and after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Miami in 2018. The staff of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette won the breaking-news reporting prize for its coverage of another mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. The prize for investigative reporting went to writers of the Los Angeles Times for their report on a University of Southern California gynecologist accused of sexually abusing hundreds of patients. Writers for The New York Times won the explanatory-reporting prize for their investigation revealing false financial claims made by United States President Donald Trump. The staff of The Advocate (Baton Rouge, Louisiana) won the local-reporting prize for documenting Louisiana’s discriminatory criminal conviction system. The staff of The Wall Street Journal earned the national-reporting prize for coverage of President Trump’s secret payoffs to women who claimed to have had affairs with him.

Reporters from the Associated Press and from Reuters shared the international-reporting prize for coverage of war atrocities in Yemen and violence against Rohingya people in Myanmar, respectively. Hannah Dreier of ProPublica won the feature-writing prize for her series documenting problems faced by Salvadoran immigrants in New York. Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch won the commentary award for revealing Missouri’s corrupt system of fines versus jail time for poor people charged with misdemeanor crimes. Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post won for literary criticism. Brent Staples of The New York Times won for editorial writing. Freelancer Darrin Bell won the editorial cartooning prize. Reuters staff photographers won the breaking-news photography award for detailing the ordeal of Central American migrants journeying to the United States border. Lorenzo Tugnoli of The Washington Post won the award for feature photography for his portraits of people affected by the war in Yemen.

Richard Powers won the fiction-writing award for The Overstory, a novel connecting nature with the human experience. Jackie Sibblies won the drama prize for examining racial prejudice in Fairview. David W. Blight won the history award for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Jeffrey C. Stewart won the biography or autobiography award for The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. Forrest Gander won the poetry prize for his collection Be With. Eliza Griswold won the nonfiction prize for Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America. Composer Ellen Reid won the Pulitzer Prize in music for her operatic work, p r i s m. Special Pulitzer citations were given to the late Aretha Franklin, for her contribution to American music and culture, and to the staff of the Capital Gazette (Annapolis, Maryland), for covering the murder of five of their own employees in the newspaper’s offices.

The Columbia University School of Journalism was founded in 1912, and the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established the prizes. Nearly all of the Pulitzer Prizes have a value of $10,000. The only exception is the prize for public service in journalism. The winner of that award receives a gold medal.

April 18, 2018

The winners of the 102^nd Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, April 16, by Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. The awards are given in the United States each year for distinguished achievement in journalism, literature, drama, and music.

Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, became one of the greatest American newspaper publishers in history. He established the Pulitzer Prizes for achievements in journalism, literature, music, and art. Credit: © Hulton Archives/Getty Images

The public service prize in 2018 went jointly to the The New York Times and The New Yorker magazine for exposing sexual harassment in Hollywood and spurring global debate on the sexual abuse of women. The staff of the The Press Democrat (Santa Rosa, California) won the breaking-news reporting prize for its coverage of wildfires that ravaged the city of Santa Rosa and Sonoma County. The prize for investigative reporting went to the staff of The Washington Post for revealing alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls that changed the course of a U.S. Senate race in Alabama.

The staffs of The Arizona Republic and USA Today Network won the explanatory-reporting prize for detailing the difficulties and consequences of constructing a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. The staff of The Cincinnati Enquirer won the local-reporting prize for documenting greater Cincinnati’s deadly heroin epidemic. The staffs of The New York Times and The Washington Post shared the national-reporting prize for coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the U.S. presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Reuters reporters Clare Baldwin, Andrew R.C. Marshall, and Manuel Mogato won the international-reporting prize for exposing the killing campaign behind Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Freelance reporter Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah won the feature-writing prize for her GQ magazine portrait of Charleston, South Carolina, church killer Dylann Roof.

John Archibald of the Alabama Media Group won the commentary award for scrutinizing corrupt local politicians, championing the rights of women, and calling out hypocrisy. Jerry Saltz of New York magazine won for visual arts criticism. Andie Dominick of The Des Moines Register (Iowa) won for editorial writing. Freelancers Jake Halpern and Michael Sloan won for their editorial cartoons in The New York Times. Ryan Kelly of The Daily Progress (Charlottesville, Virginia) won the breaking-news photography award for capturing on film a car attack during a racially-charged protest in Charlottesville. The Reuters photography staff’s documentation of violence against Rohingya people in Myanmar won the award for feature photography.

Andrew Sean Greer won the fiction-writing award for Less, a story about growing older and the essential nature of love. Martyna Majok won the drama prize for examining diverse perceptions of privilege and human connection in Cost of Living. Jack E. Davis won the history award for The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea. Hisham Matar won the biography or autobiography award for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Frank Bidart won the poetry prize for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. James Forman, Jr., won the nonfiction prize for Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. Rapper Kendrick Lamar’s album DAMN. became the first nonclassical or jazz work to win the Pulitzer Prize in music.

The Columbia University School of Journalism was founded in 1912, and the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established the prizes. Nearly all of the Pulitzer Prizes have a value of $10,000. The only exception is the prize for public service in journalism. The winner of that award receives a gold medal.

April 11, 2017

The winners of the 101^st Pulitzer Prizes were announced yesterday by Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. The awards are given in the United States each year for distinguished achievement in journalism, literature, drama, and music.

Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, became one of the greatest American newspaper publishers in history. He established the Pulitzer Prizes for achievements in journalism, literature, music, and art. Credit: © Hulton Archives/Getty Images

The public service prize in 2017 went to the New York Daily News and to ProPublica for uncovering widespread abuse of eviction rules by police to oust hundreds of people, most of them poor minorities. The staff of the East Bay Times (Oakland, California) won the breaking-news reporting prize for its coverage of the “Ghost Ship” warehouse party fire in Oakland that killed 36 people, and for its reporting after the tragedy that exposed the city’s failure to take actions that might have prevented it. The prize for investigative reporting went to Eric Eyre of the Charleston (West Virginia) Gazette-Mail for exposing the flood of opioids flowing into depressed West Virginia counties, which have the highest overdose death rates in the country.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the McClatchy Company, and The Miami Herald won the explanatory-reporting prize for the Panama Papers, a series of stories using a collaboration of more than 300 reporters on six continents to expose the hidden infrastructure and global scale of offshore tax havens. The staff of the Salt Lake (Utah) Tribune won the local-reporting prize for reports revealing the punitive and cruel treatment given to sexual assault victims at Brigham Young University. David A. Fahrenthold of The Washington Post won the national-reporting prize for his coverage of the U.S. presidential campaign of Donald Trump, which cast doubt on Trump’s assertions of generosity toward charities. The staff of The New York Times won the international reporting prize for its examination of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to project Russia’s power abroad, revealing techniques that included assassination, online harassment, and the planting of incriminating evidence on opponents. C. J. Chivers  of the The New York Times won the feature-writing prize for his look at a U.S. Marine’s postwar descent into violence.

Peggy Noonan of The Wall Street Journal won the commentary award for her columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns. Hilton Als of The New Yorker won for theater criticism. Art Cullen of The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times won for editorial writing. Jim Morin of The Miami Herald won for editorial cartooning. Free-lancer Daniel Berehulak won for breaking-news photography for his images published in The New York Times portraying the Philippine government’s assault on drug dealers and users. E. Jason Wambsgans of the Chicago Tribune won for feature photography for his his portrayal of a 10-year-old boy and his mother striving to put the boy’s life back together after he survived a shooting.

Colson Whitehead won the fiction-writing award for The Underground Railroad, which tells the story of two Georgia slaves who seek to escape their bondage by following an actual underground subway to freedom. Lynn Nottage won the drama prize for the second time, for Sweat, about steel workers in a Pennsylvania factory town ravaged by changing economics. Heather Ann Thompson won the history award for Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. Hisham Matar won the biography or autobiography award for The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, a memoir of the author’s journey home to his native Libya in search of answers to his father’s disappearance. Tyehimba Jess won the poetry prize for Olio, his second volume of poetry. Matthew Desmond won the nonfiction prize for Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which examined the cause of mass evictions after the 2008 economic crash. Du Yun won the prize in music for Angel’s Bone, an operatic work that serves as an allegory for human trafficking in the modern world.

The Columbia University School of Journalism was founded in 1912, and the first Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in 1917. Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, established the prizes. Nearly all of the Pulitzer Prizes have a value of $10,000. The only exception is the prize for public service in journalism. The winner of that award receives a gold medal.

Other World Book articles:

• See Pulitzer Prizes (1998-2014) – Back in Time articles

Other “Behind the Headlines” posts:

• 2015 Pulitzer Prize Winners Announced
• Pulitzer Prizes: Honoring Distinguished Achievement for 100 Years

April 19, 2016

The announcement of the 2016 winners of the Pulitzer Prizes marked the 100th anniversary of awards that have become the most coveted annual honors presented to American journalists, fiction writers, poets, playwrights, historians, and composers. Special committees selected winners in 21 categories—14 in journalism and 7 in the arts and literature, along with at least 2 additional finalists in each category.

Joseph Pulitzer, a Hungarian immigrant, became one of the greatest American newspaper publishers in history. He established the Pulitzer Prizes for achievements in journalism, literature, music, and art. © Hulton Archives/Getty Images

The most visible prizewinner this year is Hamilton, a musical that won the award in the drama category. Hamilton is the critically acclaimed box office blockbuster about the founding of the United States told through a mixture of musical styles, including rap and pop. American biographer T. J. Styles almost won a rare double for Custer’s Trials, a. biography of Gen. George Armstrong Custer. The book received the history prize and was one of the two finalists in the biography or autobiography category. Styles had won a biography prize in 2010.

As usual, the largest American newspapers were prominent in gathering journalism awards, including the staff of the Los Angeles Times (breaking news reporting); the staff of The Washington Post (national reporting); Alissa J. Rubin of The New York Times for international reporting and four New York Times photographers for breaking news photography); and The Boston Globe’s writer Farah Stockman for commentary and photographer Jessica Rinaldi for feature photography. The New Yorker magazine writer Kathryn Schulz won a prize for feature writing, and the publication’s television critic Emily Nussbaum won the prize for criticism.

In the arts, the closely watched fiction prize was given to University of Southern California professor Viet Thanh Nguyen for his novel The Sympathizer. The author, who was born in Vietnam, had earned widespread praise for his story rooted in the Vietnam War (1957-1975). In the music category, Henry Threadgill, a jazz composer and musician, won for his composition In for a Penny, In for a Pound. Threadgill became the third jazz composer to win the award.

The Pulitzer Prizes were established by Joseph Pulitzer, a newspaper publisher who founded the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The first prizes were awarded in 1917. They are awarded in April by Columbia University on the recommendation of the Pulitzer Prize Board. Anyone may recommend a work for a Pulitzer Prize by writing to the Pulitzer Prize office in New York City. Jurors are appointed for one year at a time. Most journalism juries consist of journalists. Most literature juries consist of distinguished writers, critics, or academic authorities for each category. Most music juries consist of composers and music critics. Each jury makes three nominations to the board. The board may accept or reject the findings of any jury or make substitute recommendations. The board votes to determine the winner of each category. If the board feels no nominated work is worth a prize, the prize may be withheld. Winners receive $10,000, except for the prize for public service in journalism. The winner of that prize receives a gold medal.

Other World Book articles

• See Pulitzer Prizes (1998-2014) – Back in Time articles