William Golding

Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, born in Newquay, Cornwall. He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read natural sciences and switched to English literature, then became a schoolmaster, teaching longest at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury, where he stayed until 1961. He served in the Royal Navy from 1940 to 1945, taking part in the pursuit of the Bismarck and commanding a rocket-launching landing craft at the Normandy landings.

His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), published by Faber & Faber, follows a group of schoolboys marooned on an island whose attempt at self-government collapses into violence; it became one of the most widely taught English novels of the twentieth century.

Eleven further novels followed, among them The Inheritors (1955), Pincher Martin (1956), Free Fall (1959), The Spire (1964), The Pyramid (1967), Darkness Visible (1979), Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). Rites of Passage won the Booker Prize in 1980, and Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983.

He was appointed CBE in 1966 and knighted in 1988. He died at Perranarworthal in Cornwall; The Double Tongue, left unfinished at his death, appeared in 1995.