Spanish · b. 1951
Pérez-Reverte spent twenty-one years as a war correspondent — Cyprus, Lebanon, Eritrea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, the Falklands, the Gulf, Bosnia, Croatia — and was reported missing in Sarajevo. He began writing novels between assignments and left journalism in 1994 when the books outsold the salary. His fiction is built out of what he read as a boy in his grandfather's library: Dumas, Stevenson, Conrad, the Golden Age. The Captain Alatriste series, about a seventeenth-century swordsman for hire, began as a history book he wrote with his daughter because Spanish schools had stopped teaching the period. He has sold more than twenty million copies in forty languages, sits in the Royal Spanish Academy in seat T, sails a boat out of Cartagena, and conducts a permanent public quarrel with almost everyone.