William Golding (1911 - 1993) was born in Cornwall and educated at Marlborough Grammar School and Brasenose College, Oxford. Before becoming a writer, he was an actor, small-boat sailor, musician and schoolteacher. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and took part in the D-Day operation and liberation of Holland. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was rejected by several publishers but rescued from the 'reject pile' at Faber and published in 1954. It became a modern classic selling millions of copies, translated into 44 languages and made into a film by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding wrote eleven other novels, a play and two essay collections. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988 and died in 1993. www.william-golding.co.ukBen Okri (1959 -) is a poet, novelist and playwright. He is the author of ten celebrated novels including The Famished Road, which won the 1991 Booker Prize, as well as collections of poetry, short stories and essays, which have been translated into over 26 languages. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has won numerous international prizes. In 2019, Astonishing the Gods was named as one of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World.' He is a Vice-President of the English Centre of International PEN and an Honorary Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford. He lives in London.

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