William Golding

William Golding was born in Newquay, Cornwall, and grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father taught at the local school. He studied natural sciences at Brasenose College, Oxford, then changed to English literature. He became a schoolteacher in Salisbury.

In World War II he served in the Royal Navy and commanded a rocket landing craft on D-Day. The war changed his view of people. He came out of it convinced that ordinary human beings can produce great evil without any outside cause.

Lord of the Flies (1954) was his first novel. A group of British schoolboys is stranded on an island after a plane crash. Without adults, their attempt at order breaks down into tribes, fear and murder. The book argues that civilization is a thin layer over violent instincts. Several publishers rejected it before Faber and Faber took it.

Golding kept teaching until 1961. He won the Booker Prize in 1980 for Rites of Passage and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died at his home in Cornwall in 1993, aged 81.