Getting your questions ready
Getting your questions ready
Beat the crowd
10 questions No timer
50 free Isabel Allende trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Isabel Allende was fired for making romance heroines too smart, told by Pablo Neruda to stop pretending to be a journalist, and chased out of Chile by Pinochet's coup. In Caracas she started a letter to her dying grandfather that became The House of the Spirits, and she has begun every book since on 8 January. Seventy-seven million copies later she is the most widely read Spanish-language author alive. These 50 questions cover the life and the shelf. Easy ones ask about her nationality, her debut, Pinochet and Obama's medal; the middle tier reaches Lima, the 13 years in Venezuela, Clara del Valle and Las Tres Marías, Bille August's film, Eva Luna and the Amazon of City of the Beasts; the hard tier asks about Margaret Sayers Peden, Manuel Escalante, Mampato magazine, the Turin Olympics and the Bolaño insult. Paula, Daughter of Fortune, Zorro, The Japanese Lover and A Long Petal of the Sea all get their turn. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Isabel Allende is a writer of which dual nationality?
Chilean-American
She has lived in California since 1989 and became a US citizen in 1993.
Q 02Allende's debut novel The House of the Spirits was published in what year?
1982
It began as a letter to her dying 99-year-old grandfather.
Q 03In which city was Isabel Allende born in 1942?
Lima
Her father was then second secretary at the Chilean embassy there.
Q 04How was Isabel Allende related to Chilean president Salvador Allende?
Her father was his first cousin
She has regularly defended his record and calls Kissinger a war criminal for the 1973 coup.
Q 05After the 1973 coup, Allende fled Chile and spent 13 years in exile in which country?
Venezuela
She wrote her debut novel there and worked as a columnist for El Nacional.
Q 06Which general led the 1973 coup that sent Isabel Allende into exile?
Augusto Pinochet
She had been helping people on the wanted lists escape until she landed on the list herself.
Q 07Which poet told the young journalist Allende she had too much imagination and should write novels?
Pablo Neruda
He also advised her to collect her satirical columns in a book, which became her first published work.
Q 08Allende was fired from a job translating romance novels for doing what?
Rewriting the heroines' dialogue
She made the heroines sound smarter and changed Cinderella endings so they found independence.
Q 09On what date does Allende traditionally begin writing each new book?
8 January
It is the date in 1981 on which she started the letter that became The House of the Spirits.
Q 10Which US president awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014?
Barack Obama
Chile had given her its National Literature Prize four years earlier.
Q 11Allende's memoir Paula takes the form of what?
A letter
She began it as a letter so Paula would not be confused when she woke from her coma.
Q 12Which disease caused the coma from which Allende's daughter Paula never recovered?
Porphyria
A medication error in hospital caused the brain damage; she died in California in December 1992.
Q 13In 1996 Allende founded a foundation in her daughter's honour dedicated to the rights of whom?
Women and children
Paula was 29 when she died in 1992.
Roughly how many copies have Allende's novels sold worldwide?
Q 21The House of the Spirits is often said to be influenced by which novel?
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Critics quickly compared Allende to García Márquez as a magical realist.
Q 22Who directed the 1993 film of The House of the Spirits?
Bille August
It won the German Lola and Danish Robert awards but flopped in America.
Q 23Which actress played Clara in the 1993 film of The House of the Spirits?
Meryl Streep
Jeremy Irons played Esteban Trueba and Antonio Banderas played Pedro Tercero.
More than 77 million
They have been translated into more than 42 languages.
Q 15Which family does The House of the Spirits follow across four generations?
The Truebas
The country is never named, but the Candidate and the Poet stand for Salvador Allende and Neruda.
Q 16In The House of the Spirits, which character has paranormal powers and keeps a detailed diary?
Clara
She falls mute for nine years after witnessing her sister Rosa's autopsy.
Q 17What is the name of Esteban Trueba's hacienda in The House of the Spirits?
Las Tres Marías
He turns the ruined estate into a model hacienda by intimidation and reward.
Q 18Who is the foreman's son who grows up with Esteban's daughter and later loves her?
Pedro Tercero
He is banished from the hacienda for spreading socialist ideas through song.
Q 19In The House of the Spirits, Esteban's sister Férula curses him to die like what?
A dog
She had grown devoted to Clara before Esteban threw her out of the big house on the corner.
Q 20After many Latin American rejections, where was The House of the Spirits first published?
Barcelona
It soon ran to more than two dozen Spanish editions.
Q 24In the 1993 film of The House of the Spirits, who narrates the story?
Blanca Trueba
The novel, by contrast, is told mainly through Esteban and Alba.
Q 25Eva Luna, the heroine of Allende's 1987 novel, is famous for what gift?
Storytelling
She grows up an orphan in an unnamed South American country resembling Venezuela.
Q 26Who translated Eva Luna and City of the Beasts into English?
Margaret Sayers Peden
She was Allende's longtime English translator.
Q 27In Eva Luna, how does Eva's mother Consuelo die?
Choking on a chicken bone
Eva was conceived with a gardener who was supposedly dying of a snakebite and then recovered.
Q 28City of the Beasts, Allende's first young-adult novel, is set where?
The Amazon rainforest
Fifteen-year-old Alexander Cold joins his grandmother Kate on a hunt for "the Beast".
Q 29In City of the Beasts, Alexander Cold's grandmother Kate writes for which magazine?
International Geographic
She hates being called Grandma and leaves him to find his own way from the airport.
Q 30Which animal is revealed to be Alexander Cold's totem in City of the Beasts?
A black jaguar
The encounter happens with a caged cat before the expedition sets off upriver.