Isabel Allende was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, the daughter of a Chilean diplomat. When her parents separated, young Isabel moved with her mother to Chile, where she spent the rest of her childhood. She married at the age of 19 and had two children, Paula and Nicolas. Her uncle was Salvador Allende, the president of Chile. When he was overthrown in the coup of 1973, she fled Chile, moving to Caracas, Venezuela. While living in Venezuela, Allende began writing her novels, many of them exploring the close family bonds between women. Her first novel, The House of the Spirits, has been translated into 27 languages, and was later made into a film. She then wrote Of Love and Shadows, Eva Luna,… and The Stories of Eva Luna, all set in Latin America. The Infinite Plan was her first novel to take place in the United States. In Paula, Allende wrote her memoirs in connection with her daughter's illness and death. She delved into the erotic connections between food and love in Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses. In addition to writing books, Allende has worked as a TV interviewer, magazine writer, school administrator, and a secretary at a U.N. office in Chile. She received the 1996 Harold Washington Literacy Award. She lives in California. Her title Maya's Notebook made The New York Times Best Seller List in 2013.
Margaret Sayers Peden is an American translator and Professor, she is a Missouri native who was born in 1920. One of the leading translators of her time, Peden has translated more than 40 books and has won numerous prizes and grants. In 2007, she collected a variety of Mexican literature to combine and edit the book Mexican Writers on Writing.
Gregory Rabassa (born 9 March 1922) is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College where he is a Distinguished Professor. Rabassa received a bachelor's degree from Dartmouth; he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University, where he earned a doctorate. He taught for over two decades at Columbia University before accepting a position at Queens College. Typically, Rabassa translates without reading the book beforehand, working as he goes. Rabassa had a particularly close and productive working relation with Cort�zar. For his version of Cort�zar's novel, Hopscotch, Rabassa received a National Book Award for… Translation. In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts. He has written a memoir detailing his experiences as a translator, If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, A Memoir.