1911-1993 · English novelist and Nobel laureate, author of Lord of the Flies
About William Golding
William Golding (1911-1993) was an English novelist born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. He taught English and philosophy at Bishop Wordsworth's School in Salisbury before and after serving in the Royal Navy in the Second World War, when he commanded a rocket-launching landing craft off Normandy on D-Day. Lord of the Flies was his first published novel; it was followed by The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, The Spire, Rites of Passage and others. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983 and was knighted in 1988.
Lord of the Flies follows a party of British schoolboys, aged roughly six to twelve, whose aeroplane is shot down over a tropical island during an unnamed atomic war. No adult survives.