Laura Restrepo (born 1950 in Bogotá, Colombia) is a Colombian author who began writing what were mainly political columns in her mid-twenties. Her first novel, Isle of Passion, is based on historical deeds that occurred on Clipperton Island. Early life Laura Restrepo is the older of two sisters. Her grandfather was self-educated and spoke six languages. Her father left school age of 13 to go out to work before becoming a businessman. According to Restrepo, her father would take her and her mother with him on his business travels and they never stayed long enough in one place to attend a full year of school. Once she attended a public school in California for only one day because her father took the family somewhere else the next day. When she was around ten years old her formal education consisted of six months at a ceramics night school in Denmark. When she and her family went to Madrid the school did not accept her because she failed the required admission tests for arithmetic, grammar, sewing, and embroidery. So instead she went to a flamenco guitar teacher. Her father took her to visit museums, theaters, ruins, and to climb volcanoes and watch geysers. He introduced her to composers such as Bartók, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. By the time she was 14 she was reading books but did not know the full multiplication table. She moved back to Colombia age fifteen where she had to work hard to earn a high school degree as she had not taken the required subjects previously but in spite of this she was able to obtain her diploma. She was the first person in her father's family to receive a diploma. Soon after she got her diploma she enrolled at the University of the Andes, Colombia. In her sophomore year in college, at the age of 16, she wrote "that beyond the nuclear family and the land of wonders that is high culture, there lay a whole universe to be explored that was broad and remote, fierce and exciting." She cut her ties to her father and never saw him again before his death a few years later. She gave up her teaching job and got involved in Colombian politics before joining the Socialist Workers Party in Spain, then soon went to Argentina for four years where she was part of the underground resistance that opposed the military