dictatorship. After three years with the Socialist Workers Party in Madrid she became a journalist. Writing career Laura Restrepo technically began writing when she was nine years old. She began writing in love, memory, and just to get the feeling of being close to him again. She returned to Colombia after three years in the Spanish Socialist Workers Party and began writing for Semana, a magazine, in the national and international politics section. During this time she traveled to different places including Grenada to report on the invasion and to the Nicaragua-Honduras border to report on the war between the Sandinistas and the Contras. During her time working for Semana she met Gabriel García Márquez. Although feeling lucky to be acquainted with him she also criticized him for his writing style of magic realism. Over time she became the political editor of Semana and wrote about ongoing peace negotiations. Restrepo voiced her opinions loudly over the failing peace treaties and the conflict that was going and received death threats and was forced into a six-year exile in Mexico. Many of the investigations she did ended up as plots or ideas in many of her novels. Her first novel was Isle of Passion which uses her normal style of investigative journalism and fiction to create a sense of wonder while it is being read. She wrote this novel while she was in Mexico, seeing as she missed Colombia so much she decided to begin a story. Leopard in the Sun was Restrepo’s second novel. This novel started with a story that Restrepo had been sent to cover a story about two families trying to kill each other. Eventually she finds out they were involved in the drug cartels in Colombia. She says "she never used the word 'drugs' in the novel, because she is convinced that 'all readers read between the lines'". Dulce Compañia is a non-traditional Restrepo novel. She uses religious beings in this novel when in fact she never had formal religious training. Restrepo has won several awards for this novel. Political career In 1982 Belisario Betancur, the president of Colombia at the time, added Restrepo to the negotiating commission to negotiate peace with the M-19 guerrillas. After Restrepo’s experience as a commissioner of peace she left the field of journalism, received death threats and was forced into exile in Mexico for six years. Her book Historia de un