Author: Enrique Bocanegra
This evening at 7pm, the historical novel El ataque a La Española (The Attack on Hispaniola) will be presented in the Simón Bolívar hall of Casa América, with a dialogue between the author and journalist Enrique Bocanegra and the historian Manuel Lucena, researcher at the CSIC and director of the chair of Spanish and Hispanic Studies at the universities of the Community of Madrid. Admission is free until full capacity is reached.
During the presentation, topics such as piracy in the Caribbean in the 16th century and the importance of the island of Hispaniola and the city of Santo Domingo in Spanish expansion in America will be discussed.
The Attack on Hispaniola tells the story of how, at the head of a fleet of thirty ships and an army of two thousand men, the English pirate Francis Drake attacks the island of Hispaniola, in the heart of the Caribbean. It is 10 January 1586 and Drake not only conquers its capital, Santo Domingo, but threatens to reduce it to rubble if its inhabitants do not pay the ransom demanded.
With negotiations at a standstill, looting and fires begin in the city and, meanwhile, inside the cathedral, the handful of locals who tried to safeguard and defend the island survive. And it is one of them, the grandson of the first chronicler of the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who narrates the occupation and capture of Hispaniola, at the same time as he begins to define his own identity and seeks how to resist the violence of the pirates.
Life was not easy in the Caribbean in the 16th century, in islands full of riches and therefore doomed to suffer the constant threat of pirates, eager for booty and destruction. And this is what Enrique Bocanegra shows in this novel, in a complete twist on the genre: a historical struggle narrated from the point of view of the Spaniards, based on the original documents of the time. Because it was not easy, and you have to know how to tell the story, and in these pages the pain, the loss, the anxiety and the madness of piracy are taken on board in a way we have never experienced before.
Enrique Bocanegra (Seville, 1973) is a journalist, cultural manager and writer. He directs the Casa Natal de Velázquez Foundation, dedicated to preserving the 16th century building where the author of Las Meninas was born, and is the Andalusian delegate of Hispania Nostra. His first work, Un espía en la trinchera (A Spy in the Trench), won the 29th edition of the Comillas Biography and History Prize. El ataque a La Española is his first historical novel.
Welcoming remarks will be given by Luis Prados, Director of Programming at Casa de América, and Juan Bolívar Díaz, Ambassador of the Dominican Republic.
Pages: 288
Publisher: Hard cover
ISBN: 9788435062329
RPP: 18,52 euros
