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William Golding
Born	September 19, 1911 Newquay, Cornwall, England
Died	June 19, 1993 (aged 81) Perranarworthal, Cornwall, England
Occupation	Novelist
Nationality	British

Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980, for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early life 1.2 Marriage and family 1.3 War service 1.4 Death 2 Career 2.1 Writing success 2.2 Fiction 2.3 Cryptozoology 3 Major works 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

Golding was born at his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mountwise, St Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall^[1] , and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught (not to be confused with Marlborough College, the "public" boarding school). His mother, Mildred,kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage. In 1930 Golding went up to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature. He took his B.A. (Hons) Second Class in the summer of 1934, and later that year his first book, Poems, was published in London by Macmillan & Co, through the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.

Golding married Ann Brookfield on 30th September 1939 and they had two children, Judy and David.^[1]

During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit of Germany's mightiest battleship, the Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, and at war's end returned to teaching and writing.^[1]

In 1985 Golding and his wife moved to Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where he died of heart failure on June 19, 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, England. He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in Ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously.^[2][3]

In September 1953 Golding sent the typescript of a book to Faber & Faber of London. Initially rejected by a reader there, the book was championed by Charles Monteith, then a new editor at the firm, and was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and Free Fall.

Publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post in 1961, and he spent that academic year as writer-in-residence at Hollins College near Roanoke, Virginia. Having moved in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology.

In 1970 Golding was a candidate for the Chancellorship of the University of Kent at Canterbury, but lost to Jo Grimond. Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, the Booker Prize in 1980, and in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.

Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject matter and technique vary. His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990, play, adapted by Nigel Williams, 1995), dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the ambiguity and fragility of civilization. The Inheritors (1955) looked back into prehistory, advancing the thesis that humankind's evolutionary ancestors, "the new people" (generally identified with homo sapiens sapiens), triumphed over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) as much by violence and deceit as by natural superiority.

Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth (BBC TV 2005), comprising the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).

William Golding was also prominent among Loch Ness Monster theorists and wrote articles for Popular Science about the nature of this purported phenomenon. ^[4]

• Poems (1934)
• Lord of the Flies (1954)
• The Inheritors (1955)
• Pincher Martin (1956)
• The Brass Butterfly (play) (1958)
• Free Fall (1959)
• The Spire (1964)
• The Hot Gates (essays) (1965)
• The Pyramid (1967)
• The Scorpion God (1971)
• Darkness Visible (1979)
• A Moving Target (essays) (1982)
• Nessie- The Legend (article) (1982)
• The Paper Men (1984)
• An Egyptian Journal (1985)
• To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
  • Rites of Passage (1980)
  • Close Quarters (1987)
  • Fire Down Below (1989)
• The Double Tongue (posthumous) (1996)

• Novels by William Golding

• The Spire a sixth form perspective at William Howard School
• Golding's Life and work reviewed at the Educational Paperback Association
• Biography of William Golding at the Nobel Prize website
• Interview by Mary Lynn Scott- Universal Pessimist, Cosmic Optimist
• Faber and Faber - UK publisher of William Golding
• William Golding Ltd Website of Golding family.
• Last Words An account of Golding's last evening by D.M. Thomas - Guardian - Saturday 10 June 2006 (Review Section)
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by Kevin McCarron (online edn, May 2006), Golding, Sir William Gerald (1911–1993)

v • d • e Man Booker Prize Winners for Fiction
1960–1969	P. H. Newby (1969)
1970–1979	Bernice Rubens (1970) • V. S. Naipaul (1971) • John Berger (1972) • James Gordon Farrell (1973) • Nadine Gordimer / Stanley Middleton (1974) • Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975) • David Storey (1976) • Paul Scott (1977) • Iris Murdoch (1978) • Penelope Fitzgerald (1979)
1980–1989	William Golding (1980) • Salman Rushdie (1981) • Thomas Keneally (1982) • John Maxwell Coetzee (1983) • Anita Brookner (1984) • Keri Hulme (1985) • Kingsley Amis (1986) • Penelope Lively (1987) • Peter Carey (1988) • Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
1990–1999	A. S. Byatt (1990) • Ben Okri (1991) • Michael Ondaatje / Barry Unsworth (1992) • Roddy Doyle (1993) • James Kelman (1994) • Pat Barker (1995) • Graham Swift (1996) • Arundhati Roy (1997) • Ian McEwan (1998) • John Maxwell Coetzee (1999)
2000–2010	Margaret Atwood (2000) • Peter Carey (2001) • Yann Martel (2002) • DBC Pierre (2003) • Alan Hollinghurst (2004) • John Banville (2005) • Kiran Desai (2006) • Anne Enright (2007)

v • d • e Nobel Laureates in Literature
Saul Bellow (1976) • Vicente Aleixandre (1977) • Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) • Odysseas Elytis (1979) • Czesław Miłosz (1980) • Elias Canetti (1981) • Gabriel García Márquez (1982) • William Golding (1983) • Jaroslav Seifert (1984) • Claude Simon (1985) • Wole Soyinka (1986) • Joseph Brodsky (1987) • Naguib Mahfouz (1988) • Camilo José Cela (1989) • Octavio Paz (1990) • Nadine Gordimer (1991) • Derek Walcott (1992) • Toni Morrison (1993) • Kenzaburo Oe (1994) • Seamus Heaney (1995) • Wisława Szymborska (1996) • Dario Fo (1997) • José Saramago (1998) • Günter Grass (1999) • Gao Xingjian (2000)
Complete roster | (1901–1925) | (1926–1950) | (1951–1975) | (1976-2000) | (2001–2025)