William Golding

1911 – 1993

Sir William Gerald Golding was a British novelist, playwright, and poet whose 1954 debut novel Lord of the Flies—a parable of civilization and savagery told through the experience of British schoolboys stranded on an uninhabited island—has sold tens of millions of copies and become a fixture of secondary-school curricula worldwide. He won the 1980 Booker Prize for Rites of Passage, the first volume of his sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth, and was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature for the body of his work.

Last checked: May 10, 2026, 1:06 PM