William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1991. He – was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford, after which he worked as an actor, a lecturer, a small craft sailor, a musician, and finally a schoolmaster. A now rare volume, Poems, appeared in 1934. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940, and saw action against battleships, submarines and aircraft. He was present at the sinking of the Bismarck, and finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel, Lord of the Flies, WaS published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961, and went on to write twelve more novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and The Spire. Golding’s play The Brass Butterfly was produced at the New Theatre, Oxford, in 1958, directed by Alistair Sim. Lord of the Flies was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his two collections of essays, The Hot Gates, and A Moving Target. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. At this time he moved from the Wiltshire village where he had lived for half a century, to a fine house near Truro in Cornwall. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993, leaving a draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, which was published posthumously.
