Contact:  Rick Peterson, Manager of News Services, 920/832-6590
For Immediate Release
May 15, 2000

LU Awards Honorary Degree to International Best-Selling Author Isabel
Allende

     
     APPLETON, WIS. -- Acclaimed Latin American novelist Isabel Allende
will be  recognized for her literary accomplishments Tuesday, May 23
with an honorary degree at Lawrence University's annual Honors
Convocation.  Lawrence will confer an honorary doctor of literature
degree upon Allende, who closes out the 1999-2000 convocation series
with the address "Stories and Dreams."
     The convocation, at 11:10 a.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel, is
free and open to the public.  Following her address, Allende will
conduct a question-and-answer session in the chapel.
     The author of six best sellers, Allende, 57, has risen from
political exile to international critical acclaim relatively quickly.
The niece and goddaughter of former Chilean President Salvador Allende,
she fled Chile in 1973 during a bloody coup that killed her uncle and
resettled in Venezuela.
     She spent nine years there as a newspaper journalist in Caracas and
released her first novel, "The House of the Spirits" in 1982.  The novel
started out as a long letter to her dying grandfather in Chile and
evolved into a three-generational saga of the Trueba family, interwoven
with the history of Chile.  The New York Times hailed it as "possible
allegory of the past, present and future of Latin America." 
     Her first nonfiction novel, "Paula," released in 1994, also began
as a letter.  What started as a memoir to her 28-year-old, terminally
ill daughter became a meditation on a mother's life and a daughter's
death.  Her novel "Aphrodite" won the 1998 Dorothy and Lillian Gish
Prize, while her most recent work, "Daughter of Fortune," a detailed
historical novel set during the California gold rush, has spent 11 weeks
on The New York Times best-sellers list since its release last fall.
     In addition to her novels, Allende has written children's stories,
plays for the Chilean theatre, hosted a pair of television shows in
Santiago and taught literature at the University of Virginia and the
University of California-Berkeley.
     Born in Lima, Peru, Allende moved with her mother to Chile at the
age of three.  She ended a 15-year exile from Chile in 1990, returning
to receive the Gabriela Minstral award, named in honor of the Chilean
poet and educator who won the 1945 Nobel Prize in literature.   Allende
has made her home in San Rafael, Calif., since 1988.