Isabel Soler

Isabel Soler is a lecturer in Portuguese Language and Literature at the University of Barcelona. Her research is in the area of transoceanic voyages in the Renaissance, in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. She has published several books as the result of her studies, among them El nudo y la esfera (The Knot and the Sphere, 2003), Los mares náufragos (The Shipwreck Seas, 2004), Carta del descubrimiento de Brasil (Letter on the Discovery of Brazil, 2008), Derrota de Vasco de Gama (The Defeat of Vasco da Gama, 2011), and El sueño del rey (The King’s Dream, 2015). She has also written about the five years that Cervantes spent in a prison in Algiers, in Miguel de Cervantes: los años de Argel (Miguel de Cervantes; The Algiers Years, Acantilado, 2016), and also about the conversations between the painter Francisco d’Holanda and Michelangelo in 1538, which are included in Diálogos de Roma de Francisco de Holanda (The Roman Dialogues of Francisco de Holanda, 2018).

She writes for several literary publications, notable among them being Cuadernos hispanoamericanos and Artes del ensayo. She has translated several Portuguese-language writers from different parts of the globe, including the Brazilian Jorge Amado, the Angolan Manuel Rui, and the Portuguese Vergílio Ferreira. Her most recent book is Magallanes & Co. (Magellan & Co., Acantilado, 2022) where she tells the story of the circumnavigation of the globe, which Magellan and his crew began in 1519, basing her account on testimonies of sailors and merchants as well as many other sources.