Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda

Almost everything about this author is uncertain, including his real identity. Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda is generally understood to be a pseudonym used by the writer who published an unauthorized continuation of Don Quixote in 1614, before Miguel de Cervantes brought out his own second part.

That book, usually referred to as the false or apocryphal second part of Don Quixote, made Avellaneda a lasting literary curiosity. Scholars have proposed various real people behind the name, but no single identification has been confirmed.

What makes him memorable is not a large body of work, but the impact of one provocative book. By stepping into Cervantes’s fictional world, Avellaneda became part of the story of Don Quixote itself—and remains one of Spanish literature’s most intriguing enigmas.