Miguel de Cervantes

Miguel de Cervantes wrote the first modern novel and spent most of his life in poverty. Born near Madrid in 1547, the son of a barber-surgeon who moved constantly to escape debt, he had an irregular education and fled to Italy around 1569, possibly after wounding a man in a duel. He enlisted and fought at Lepanto in October 1571, rising from a sickbed with a fever to take a position on deck. He was shot twice in the chest and once in the left hand, which was maimed permanently — he called himself the one-handed man of Lepanto and always said it was the greatest occasion of his life. Sailing home in 1575 he was captured by Barbary corsairs and held in Algiers for five years, attempting escape four times and being spared each time. His family and the Trinitarians eventually raised the ransom. He returned to Spain to find no reward. He worked as a requisitioner of grain and oil for the Armada — which got him excommunicated for seizing church property — and as a tax collector, and was imprisoned at least twice over irregular accounts. Don Quixote appeared in 1605 when he was fifty-seven, and its second part in 1615, prompted by an unauthorised sequel. An elderly gentleman driven mad by chivalric romances rides out with a peasant squire; the book mocks the genre and then makes the reader take the deluded knight's side, moving between comedy, self-reference and grief. He died in Madrid in April 1616, days before Shakespeare.

• Lived: 1547 CE – 1616 CE
• Nationality: Spanish
• Roles: writer, soldier