Lord of the Flies
Born in Cornwall in 1911, William Golding attended Marlborough Grammar School and went on to study English Literature at Oxford University. He worked as a teacher but took a break from the classroom in 1940, when he joined the Royal Navy to fight in World War Two. When he returned to teaching he also focussed more on writing and, after 21 rejections, his first and best-known novel The Lord of the Flies was finally published in 1954. Golding was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983 and in 1988 he was knighted. He died in Cornwall in 1993.
Ian McEwan is a critically acclaimed author whose works have been translated into over thirty languages. Educated at the University of Sussex and the University of East Anglia, his first published work, the collection of short stories First Love, Last Rites (1975), won the Somerset Maugham Award. As well as Atonement (2001), his novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, Enduring Love (1997), Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize, Saturday (2005), On Chesil Beach (2007), Sweet Tooth (2012) and The Children Act (2014). His most recent novel is Nutshell (2016).