In 1939, an old cargo ship, the SS Winnipeg, docked in Valparaiso, Chile. On board were 2,200 refugees of the Spanish Civil War who had made the perilous crossing into France, where they were detained in internment camps.

Upon learning of their plight, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda organised an expedition to transport the Spanish refugees to his country to start new lives.

Of the night the Winnipeg set sail, he wrote: "Critics may erase all of my poetry if they wish/But this poem, that I recall today, cannot be erased by anyone."

The voyage of the Winnipeg is remembered in A Long Petal Of The Sea, the latest novel by Isabel Allende, one of Latin America's best-known female writers.

Allende, 77, is all too familiar with the condition of exile. Born in Peru and raised in Chile, she became a political refugee after the military coup of 1973, in which President Salvador Allende - her father's first cousin - was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet.

After she received death threats and her mother and stepfather were nearly assassinated, she fled to Venezuela.f

"It's easy for me to remember the feeling of vulnerability - of being unsafe, of not belonging, the feeling that you can be deported or expelled any moment," she says over the telephone from her home in California.

"It's very hard. You go to another place and nothing of what you've done before is useful. Nobody cares if you were a doctor or a taxi driver. You have no past, you have no connections, no friends and usually no money."

It was in exile that Allende, who was a journalist in Chile, discovered her gift for fiction.

Upon learning her grandfather was on his deathbed, she began writing a letter to him that swelled into her debut novel, The House Of The Spirits (1982, available at bit.ly/House_spirits), a multigenerational, magical realist tale set against the political upheavals of Chile's history.

Displacement, she says, "created in me a sense of almost paralysing nostalgia, the feeling that I had lost so much and I was losing all the memories I had".

"I think The House Of The Spirits was an attempt to recover those memories and everything that I had lost - the people who had died or been arrested or scattered all over the world, my family, my friends, my house, everything."

Allende has written 24 books, which have sold more than 74 million copies worldwide.

Her numerous accolades include Chile's National Literature Prize and the Gabriela Mistral Inter-American Prize for Culture, as well as the 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was awarded to her by then United States President Barack Obama.

A Long Petal Of The Sea was first published in Spanish last year. The English translation by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson is out today.

The book was inspired by Allende's friend Victor Pey Casado, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and later sailed to Chile on the Winnipeg.

He was arrested during the 1973 coup and later went into exile in Venezuela, where he met Allende. He died, aged 103, six days before she could send him the manuscript that had been dedicated to him.

The novel takes its title from a poem by Neruda, in which he describes Chile as a "long petal of sea and wine and snow".

Allende recalls visiting the Nobel laureate - who appears as a character in A Long Petal Of The Sea and The House Of The Spirits - before his death, which has long been attributed to cancer, though many suspect he was poisoned by the Secret Service.

She had hoped to interview him, only to be told that he thought her "the worst journalist in the country".

"He said that I was never objective, that I lied all the time and that if I didn't have a story, I would probably make one up. Why didn't I switch to literature, where all those defects are virtues?

"I was very disappointed at the time that he didn't want to give me an interview. But later, I realised he was absolutely right."

Neruda is currently the subject of controversy because of an account in his memoir, in which he described what could be construed as raping a maid.

"The young feminists in Chile cannot forgive this," says Allende. "And I totally agree with them: Rape is unforgivable.

"But you cannot change the work of someone. The work stands by itself. If we are going to censor the work of creators because of their personal lives, I wonder how many would be left? Very few."

Allende became an American citizen in 1993 and expresses her concern about the direction the US is taking under President Donald Trump.

"It is very scary. But I have lived long enough to know that there's always change, things come and go. And the trend is towards more democracy, more information, more globalisation, more education. The world is better today than it was when I was born."

Part of the work by her charity, the Isabel Allende Foundation, involves supporting non-profit groups such as the Young Centre for Immigrant Children's Rights and Kids In Need Of Defence, which provides pro bono attorneys for unaccompanied immigrant and refugee children who are being deported.

Allende started the foundation in memory of her daughter Paula Frias Allende, who died at 29 after falling into a porphyria-induced coma.

Allende wrote the 1994 memoir Paula (available at bit.ly/Paula_IA) while tending to her in hospital. It remains the hardest book she has ever written, she says.

"It saved me from a horrible depression," she says. "I kept a journal in the hospital and I wrote letters to my mother in Chile, 180 letters. After my daughter died on Dec 6, 1992, my mother asked me, 'What are you going to write in January?' because I begin all my books in January. And I said, 'Nothing. I just can't write.'

"'What are you talking about?' she said. 'You have to write. If you don't write, you will die.' And she gave me back those letters and said, 'Read them.'

"It was a very hard journey. But the things I had written during that year carried me through writing the book. It was very cathartic in a way."

Allende has a son, Nicolas, with her first husband Miguel Frias, whom she divorced in 1987.

She married her second husband, lawyer and mystery writer Willie Gordon, in 1988, but they separated in 2015. Last July, she wed her third husband, Mr Roger Cukras, a widower in his 70s who had heard her speaking on the radio and contacted her through her office.

"He started writing to me every morning and every evening for five months," she recalls.

"And at some point, he sold his house, gave away everything it contained and moved to California to be with me. I remember that when he arrived, he said, 'Well, if this doesn't work, I'll be homeless.'

"People often ask me what it is like to fall in love at my age. In fact, they seem to be surprised that I can still talk in full sentences. They expect me to be demented or something.

"But I think it is love that keeps us going, especially in our old age. The difference is that you have a sense of urgency. You have no time to waste. How many years do we have, Roger and I? Not many. We have to enjoy them."

• A Long Petal Of The Sea ($24.49) is available at: bit.ly/Long_Petal

This article includes affiliate links. When you buy through affiliate links in the article, we may earn a small commission.