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William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'reject pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. www.william-golding.co.uk Annie Proulx is a celebrated American author and journalist. Her novels include The Shipping News, which won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Fiction as well as being made into a major film in 2001, as well as Postcards, Accordion Crimes, That Old Ace in the Hole and Barkskins. Her short story 'Brokeback Mountain' was adapted into an award-winning motion picture in 2005. She lives in New Hampshire.
'Golding writes the past as present [with] uncanny skill and tremendous intuition.' - Ben Okri 'Golding's best and most accessible story since Lord of the Flies.' - Melvyn Bragg 'An extraordinary novel.' - Observer
