Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran is remembered for his 1923 work “The Prophet,” a collection of fables in which a prophet speaking to a group of people offers wisdom on subjects including marriage, beauty, death, and more. When a seer of the city asks him to speak about love, the prophet responds with these words. His advice reminds us that cultivating love takes time and effort. Love well earned, Gibran seems to say, is love that will last.

Chilean author Isabel Allende is one of the most widely read Spanish-language authors in the world, with a style that combines magical realism, personal experience, and historic events. She began her writing career translating Barbara Cartland novels into Spanish, while surreptitiously adding a few changes to make the female characters more intelligent (a practice that later got her fired). She was a TV personality for a while, wrote for a feminist magazine, worked for the United Nations, and fled Chile to Venezuela following dictator Augusto Pinochet’s coup. She later moved to California, where she still lives and writes today. To say that she was well received in the U.S. would be an understatement: In 2014, Allende was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.