William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential writers of modern times.

Lord of the Flies, his first novel, has been read by millions, translated into more than forty-five languages, and adapted for screen and stage drama. He drew on his own experience as a teacher and his service in the Second World War, where – as he says – he saw ‘what one man could do to another’. In the novel a group of schoolboys emerge from a plane crash on an idyllic tropical island. There are no adults, and they must survive on their own. The ensuing events continue to grip new readers every day, and the story has entered popular cultures all over the world.

William Golding then wrote a series of remarkable novels on such wide-ranging subjects as the last days of the Neanderthals (The Inheritors), the life-and-death struggles of an anti-hero (Pincher Martin), and the moral cost of making a work of art (The Spire). His settings are as diverse as post-war London (Darkness Visible) and ancient Greece (The Double Tongue). In his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth, he takes the reader on an early nineteenth-century voyage to Australia, displaying a flair for adventure and comedy, as well as offering a profound analysis of class and sexuality. Rites of Passage, the first novel of the sea trilogy, won the Booker Prize in 1980.

A committed writer all his life, William Golding wrote twelve novels, short stories, a play, two essay volumes, and a travel journal, as well as a volume of poetry published when he was still a student. At his death, he left over a million words of unpublished journals and notebooks. His at times tumultuous personal life and its relationship to his work were detailed in a biography by Oxford professor John Carey, and in a memoir by his daughter Judy, both published by Faber.

William Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and knighted in 1988.

Born in Newquay in 1911, William Golding lived much of his life in Wiltshire near the cathedral city of Salisbury. In 1985 he and his wife Ann, his first and most trusted reader, moved back to Cornwall. He died there at his home outside Truro in 1993.