Isabel Allende Receives Denmark’s Top Literary Award

Chilean novelist Isabel Allende received Denmark’s top literary award on Sunday, winning the equivalent of 86,000 dollars for her “magical” and spellbinding work, organisers said.

Denmark’s Crown Prince Frederik awarded Allende the Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award in the city of Odense, Andersen’s birthplace some 150 kilometres (90 miles) west of the capital Copenhagen.

The prize, worth 500,000 Danish kroner (67,000 euros, $86,000), was awarded “for her qualities as a magical storyteller and her ability to spellbind her audience,” a statement said.

Accepting the prize which was announced in March, Allende said: “I hope that some of Andersen’s magic will rub off on me.”

The author of some 19 works in Spanish that have been translated into 35 languages and sold 57 million copies, Allende is the third writer to have been awarded the prize.

Allende follows in the path of Brazil’s Paulo Coelho, author of the “Alchemist” who received the award in 2007, and Britain’s J.K. Rowling, the creator of the “Harry Potter” series, who scooped the honour in 2010.

Aged 70, the author of the “House of the Spirits”, “Of Love and Shadows”, and “Zorro” is the daughter of a diplomat who is the first cousin of Chilean president Salvador Allende, who was toppled and committed suicide in a 1973 military coup.

Allende, who is also a journalist and professor of Latin American literature, has received around 50 prizes in more than 16 countries and defends the cause of women in the world through her foundation.

france24