Edwin Williamson, the King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies and Fellow of Exeter College, has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for two years from October 2015 to complete a book on “The Making of Don Quixote: How Cervantes Came to Write the First Modern Novel”. This will be a critical study of of Cervantes's evolution as a writer during the last three decades of his life (1585-1616), with a particular focus on the process of composition of his great masterpiece, now a classic of world literature, in the context of the author's other writings and the Spanish culture and society of his time.