At 84, Isabel Allende has discovered that she has not "matured at all" and that "age does not make you wiser," she said today at a press conference after winning the Planeta Prize the day before with "La hora antes del alba," for which she reviewed "many of the things I lived through" during Chile's dictatorship.

Writing this novel, starring Alba, a young woman tortured and raped in prison, who gives continuity to the character from "The House of the Spirits," she discovered that "I haven't changed that much. I am the same person. I haven't matured at all."

She is "passionate about the same things, I fall in love with the first one who comes along, I still like Antonio Banderas. I haven't changed. In writing I haven't changed either."

Allende is interested in "the same themes: I like to write about anonymous people who seem insignificant and who, when put to the test, display overwhelming heroism. I saw it at the beginning of the military coup. I saw how many solidarity-minded people risked their lives to help others. And that is the theme that reappears in the books."

Chile "is never mentioned in The House of the Spirits or in any of my novels, but it is supposed to be the land to which I always return."

For this novel she reviewed "many of the things I lived through" during Chile's dictatorship, which she left in 1973.

In it, the protagonist, Alba, "stays in the house, which represents the country. Everything that happens in that magical house is what happens in the country. There are two levels of reading: her story, of tragedy and romance, and the story of the country, how the dictatorship evolves, the dictator, and how it ends," she advanced.

Alba "has a tyrant, the torturer, who does not leave her in peace. However, she does not leave her country because she loves her land very much; it is very hard to leave and adapt, one lives in nostalgia when abroad. She stays waiting for her lover, who was a guerrilla fighter who disappeared in the first days of the dictatorship," the writer noted.

Allende said she cares "a lot about democracy because I know what it means to lose it and how much it costs to recover it. Since I was 30 I have lived in a state of memory, trying to keep my country alive in my life and living with the memory of all the people I lost."

Circumstances—she stressed—"force me to return to that exercise of memory."

In the United States, where she lives, "democratic institutions are in danger. It is a country that has such a solid democracy that it is an example for the world. But democracy is lost, sometimes suddenly as in Chile, and other times it is undermined until it collapses."

The best-selling writer in Spanish—more than 80 million copies—since she published her first, "The House of the Spirits," in 1982, believes her books "work because I always talk about emotions and relationships, and those are universal. Emotionally we are all the same."

She recounted that when she was writing "The House of the Spirits" she "didn't know what I was doing. I wrote with the confidence of the ignorant. With a tremendous freedom that I never had again afterward."

She has written "32 books, and has that made me more confident? No, not at all. That lack of confidence forces me to test myself constantly."

The first weeks of writing her novels "are terrible, because they are totally unknown terrain. And suddenly one of the characters does something unexpected and there I know the novel has taken off (…) When I finish the book I am terrified again. Many times I don't know what it is about until some critic tells me," she pointed out.

"La hora antes del alba" will go on sale, with a print run of 210,000 copies, on November 4, the day it will be presented at the headquarters of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) in Madrid.

The writer does not believe this novel will be banned in some U.S. school libraries as happened with "The House of the Spirits," but she believes "it is an honor to be banned. That means they are going to read you."

Asked what she has left to win after this prize, she answers jokingly that "maybe a fourth husband. No, the one I have works. For now": "I have nothing to gain. What I have left of life is to have a good time, keep writing while I can, and enjoy my dogs and my husband, in that order."

The Planeta Prize, the highest-endowed in Spanish—one million euros—for an unpublished book, was the first award Allende ever submitted to in her entire career, and she did so under the pseudonym Luz Ventura and the title "Los que faltan."

Yesterday she received it from King Felipe VI at a gala held in Barcelona with 1,300 attendees, alongside the finalist—a prize endowed with 200,000 euros—Spanish writer and screenwriter Sergio Hernández Carrasco, 32, with his work "La añoranza," with whom she appeared this Friday at a press conference.