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.uk


DBC Pierre was born in 1961 in South Australia and was brought up in Mexico and the UK. Formerly a designer and a cartoonist, his debut novel, Vernon God Little (2003), won the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel, the Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman Award and the James Joyce Award. His other novels include Ludmila’s Broken English (2006), Lights Out in Wonderland (2010), Breakfast with the Borgias (2014) and Meanwhile in Dopamine City (2020). He is also the author of Petit Mal (2013), a selection of stories and non-fiction; Release the Bats (2016), which explores the art of storytelling; and a collection of true stories, Big Snake Little Snake: An Inquiry into Risk (2022).