Hello and welcome to Waste Change the World. I'm Krishnan Garimerti and this is the

podcast in which we talk to extraordinary people about the big ideas in their lives and

the events that have helped shape them. My guest this week has been called the world's

most widely read Spanish language author. Her books often and pushing women at the centre,

paying homage to some incredible female characters.

I'm more interested in people who are not sheltered by the big umbrella of the establishment.

The stories I tell are the stories of people who are in the margins.

But Isabel Iende's writing is not just influenced by her feminism but also by her own experience

of being a refugee fleeing Chile during the Civil War.

I would say that I have been a political exile or a refugee in some ways.

And an immigrant and there's a big difference between both.

Isabel Iende, thank you very much for joining me. Thank you for having me.

Now you have a new book out via letter which well you tell me what it's about.

Well it's the story of a woman who is born in 1920 when the Spanish flu pandemic reached South

America and dies with a COVID pandemic. So she lives a hundred years, very interesting years,

the 20th century, part of which of course I witnessed. But it's mostly the time that my mother lived

and when my mother died many people said right about her. She was a very special person but she

did not have an extraordinary life. So I created a character that would be a little bit like her

but with a more interesting life and what makes that life interesting is that she can support herself

and therefore it can control her life a little better than my mother did.

Is it a life you wish your mother had? It's not a happy life but I wish then and I still wish

that my mother would have had more independence and develop her talents and her abilities

...