William Golding

William Golding was born in 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall, and grew up in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father taught science at the grammar school. He went up to Brasenose College, Oxford, to read natural sciences, switched after two years to English, and published a small book of poems in 1934. He became a schoolmaster, teaching from 1940 at Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury, but that same year joined the Royal Navy. His wartime service, which included commanding a rocket-firing landing craft on D-Day, left him with a lasting conviction of humanity’s capacity for evil.

Back in the classroom, he wrote Lord of the Flies (1954), in which schoolboys marooned on an island descend from order into savagery; rejected by many publishers before Faber took it, it became one of the most widely read novels of the century. Golding’s next books were stranger and more daring: The Inheritors imagines the last Neanderthals encountering modern humans, Pincher Martin the consciousness of a drowning sailor, and The Spire a medieval dean’s ruinous ambition to raise a cathedral spire. In each, a closely realised physical world serves as the setting for a moral fable about pride, guilt and the limits of reason.

After a period of relative silence in the late 1960s and 1970s, Darkness Visible (1979) and Rites of Passage (1980), which won the Booker Prize and began his sea trilogy, renewed his reputation. He received the Nobel Prize in 1983 and was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in Cornwall in 1993.