A CHAT WITH… Isabel Allende

The bestselling author has written 23 books. Here, she discusses the inspiration behind her latest

- SHARON SWEENEY

A Long Petal of the Sea is based on a story I was told 40 years ago. It starts with the Winnipeg, a ship sent to France by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, to rescue Spanish refugees at the end of the Civil War and bring them to Chile. The title is from one of Neruda’s poems.

One of the 2,200 rescued refugees was a striking man called Victor Pey. I met him when we were both in exile in Venezuela after the 1973 military coup in Chile.

He told me the story of his life; the war, the internment camps in France, being on the Winnipeg, arriving in Chile and eventually becoming friends with both Salvador Allende [the former president of Chile] and Neruda, to whom he was very grateful.

I hadn’t thought about that story for years, but with the terrible plight of refugees and immigrants today, it was a subject I had to explore.