Lord of the Flies

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek. He won the Booker Prize for his novel Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988.