The Hello, I'm Kim Chicanetza, and for the next hour I'm going to be in conversation with two of the world's leading writers, Isabelle AYende from Chile and Edna O'Brien from Ireland. Isabel is now 77 and recently published her 23rd novel.

Edna is 89 and last year published her 19th novel.

Both writers often centre their novels on the lives of women and touch on the themes of displacement,

exile, love and loss.

We'll hear from Edna O'Brien later in the program, but let's start with Isabel Ayende, who's joining me from her home in California.

Isabel's life has been a nomadic one. She was forced to leave Chile in the 1970s as a result of a political coup.

She then moved to Venezuela and now lives in the US. It was while in exile that she wrote her best-selling

debut novel The House of the Spirits. Her latest novel is called A Long Petal of

the Sea and a deathly weaves fact and fiction history and memory to tell the story of a young

couple who flee the Spanish Civil War to Chile on a boat for refugees charted by the

Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Naruda.

Isabelle welcome.

Thank you so much for having me in the program, Kim.

I'm delighted to have you.

Now your latest novel is based on a little-known kernel of history that the

Chilean poet had charted this boat of refugees. How did you first find out about

the story? Well, Pablo Néuda sent 2,200 refugees to Chile in 1939 and those people remained in

Chile and made a big difference in the society. So the story of their arrival is more or less known in Chile.

But I suppose I heard it when I was a child, but I didn't really register any of it until much later when I was

living in 1976 in Venezuela, or probably by the end of 1975 and I met one of the passengers of the ship that that

came to Chile the Winnipeg that passenger was called Victor Pei and he was leaving his second exile

because after the military coup in Chile he needed to get out as well after

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