She describes how Cervantes told and retold his own account of enslavement: in plays, poetry and novellas including The English Spanish Girl and The Liberal Lover, as well as what Garcés calls “Cervantes’s most important autobiographical narrative” – the tale told by a captive in Part 1 of Don Quixote. Garcés’s 2005 book Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive’s Tale explores the idea that survivors of traumatic events have an urge to repeat their stories. The marvel of words has always fascinated me.” “I survived my captivity, I think, thanks to some of the books my captors brought me, which I requested, including a decrepit Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s Complete Works… When I had nothing to read, I read a Larousse Spanish Dictionary from top to bottom. “I have always read intensely and found solace in literature,” she says. Between December 1982 and July 1983, she was held hostage by a guerrilla group in Colombia. Garcés, who is professor of Hispanic studies at Cornell University, understands the trauma of captivity.

1581-1583) and his novel La Galatea (1585), to his posthumous book The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617), the story of this traumatic experience continuously speaks through his work.” “From the first works written after his liberation, such as the play Life in Algiers (c. “His five-year captivity in Algiers left an indelible impression on his fiction,” Cervantes scholar María Antonia Garcés tells BBC Culture. When he was freed – with a ransom raised by Trinitarian friars attached to the convent he was to be buried beneath – he had become the man who would write one of the greatest novels in history. There, he was kept as a slave for five years.

In 1575, after fighting in military campaigns against the Turks in the Mediterranean, the Spaniard was captured by Barbary pirates and taken to Algiers.

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes