Cervantes died on April 22 by his own reckoning but was buried on April 23, and due to Spain's earlier adoption of the Gregorian calendar, his death actually preceded Shakespeare's by ten days despite sharing a calendar date. The coincidence still anchors UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day, celebrated globally on April 23.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, a former soldier who lost the use of his left hand at the Battle of Lepanto and endured five years as a captive in Algiers, spent his final years in poverty despite having written the era's most beloved novel. Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, mocked the chivalric romances of his youth while inventing something new: a sprawling, self-aware comic novel often cited as the first in the modern sense.
He died in Madrid, likely of diabetes-related complications, and was buried the following day, April 23, 1616, at the Convent of the Trinitarian Nuns — a detail confirmed only in 2015 when researchers exhumed a jumble of bones believed to be his. Because Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1582 while England clung to the Julian calendar until 1752, Cervantes's death on April 22/23 actually fell ten real days before Shakespeare's on April 23, 1616 — a mismatched twinning that nonetheless gave UNESCO its excuse in 1995 to declare April 23 World Book and Copyright Day.