The House Of The Spirits (1982), tracing four generations of Chilean women up to the aftermath of the coup, became an international bestseller. Now 57, she wrote her first novel when she was almost 40, in Venezuela. For Allende, writing has in part been a tenacious reflex to loss, whether of exile or bereavement. That vocation not only helped her break the junta's 'chain of hatred' in her own soul, but later eased her recovery from the death, seven years ago, of her 28-year-old daughter Paula, who had lain comatose for 12 months with the rare genetic disorder, porphyria. Yet while her family, like a million other Chilean exiles, was scattered by the coup, she is convinced that had she not fled across the mountains, eventually making her way to Venezuela, where she stayed until 1987, she would not have become a writer. (That his daughter, now a Socialist politician, is also called Isabel still results in juxtaposed portraits in the British press, a confusion that the author, who sometimes fancies she was switched with another infant at birth, might relish.) The military coup toppled her 'uncle' - strictly, her second cousin - and godfather Salvador Allende, the world's first freely elected Marxist president, who committed suicide - or was murdered - in the burning presidential palace in Santiago. It had been there in the shadows, the brutality and violence, but for me, it was like waking into a nightmare.'

'It was a revelation that there were concentration camps and torture centres all over the country. 'I never imagined such a thing was possible in Chile, which had such a solid, 160-year-old democracy - it was called the 'England' of Latin America,' she says. I sabel Allende divides her life starkly into two: before and after the 1973 coup in Chile that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power and precipitated an exile from which she has never fully returned.

A view from the bridge