Isabel Allende wins the Planeta Prize at 84, the first she ever entered: "My life has been a roller coaster"

Isabel Allende is 84, has more than twenty books translated around the world and a name everyone who has ever walked into a bookshop knows. And yet the 2026 Planeta Prize is the first literary award she has ever entered. "I didn't expect this, what a great emotion," said the Chilean writer, who received the prize in Barcelona on 15 October from Spain's King Felipe and Queen Letizia.

The winning novel is called "The Hour Before Dawn" and, according to the publishers, it closes the world of the characters from "The House of the Spirits" - the book that made Allende a global name. A circle closing more than four decades later, on a stage where it's usually authors still looking to make a name who compete.

Months before the prize, at her home in Sausalito, California, she described her life with one image: "My life has been a roller coaster." Highs and lows - and the hardest of all, the death of her daughter Paula. "I have finally found peace and love," she says of where she is now.

Paula fell into a coma at 28 and died in 1992, at 29. Allende says she promised her she would live for her too, and that when she faces a hard decision, she asks herself what Paula would do. "The only thing that has helped me is having her constantly in my thoughts," the writer says. And a sentence she says without any pathos: "Death is a terrible inconvenience, but it is no obstacle to love or to communication."

In 2019 she married the American lawyer Roger Cukras, after two long relationships before that. She doesn't talk about passion, but about companionship, friendship and trust - words rarely heard when celebrities describe their marriages. Her son Nicolás lives twelve minutes from her house and works with her at the foundation and on her projects.

Does she regret anything? "Everything," Allende says, and laughs. A woman who survived the worst thing that can happen to a parent stands on a stage at 84 with a prize in her hand and jokes about her own regrets. How many of us would have that kind of courage - to enter a competition after more than four decades of writing, risking losing?