William Golding was born in 1911 and educated at his local grammar school and Brasenose College, Oxford. He published a volume of poems in 1934 and during the war served int he Royal Navy. Afterwards he returned to being a school master in Salisbury. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was an immediate success, and was followed by a series of remarkable novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, and was awared the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and knighted in 1988. He died in 1993.