William Golding

William Golding was a British novelist, poet and playwright, born on 19 September 1911 in Newquay, Cornwall, and who died on 19 June 1993. He worked as a schoolteacher before turning fully to writing, and his years in the Royal Navy during the Second World War shaped his view of human nature. His first novel, Lord of the Flies, appeared in 1954 and became one of the most widely read books of its century, often studied in schools. His fiction is usually compact and symbolic, returning to questions of guilt, cruelty, faith and the limits of reason. He moved easily between settings, from prehistoric forests to medieval cathedral-building and sea voyages of the early nineteenth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, and later received a knighthood. His work still matters because it asks plain, uncomfortable questions about how ordinary people behave when the rules of society fall away.