William Golding

William Golding (1911-1993) born in Cornwall, England. He began studies in the natural sciences at the University of Oxford, but soon abandoned them to instead devote himself to English literature. For several years he worked as a teacher before enlisting in the British Navy in 1940.  Golding was horrified by what war revealed about people’s capacity to harm their fellow humans.  He was appalled by what happened in the Nazi concentration camps, and by the way the Japanese mistreated their prisoners. 

Golding recognizes his own symptoms from PTSD and attempts to deal with them through his writing. His writing changed after World War Il because of his attempt to work through his PTSD.

Golding said ‘Woe unto me if I don’t speak of the things of God’.  He was a Christian and had an overt Christian faith that is shown in much of his writing.

Since its publication in 1954, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has retained remarkable popular success. Golding’s story of a group of British schoolboys deserted on a foreign island, and stripped of their civilized selves remains a page-turner.

In 1980 he won the ‘Booker Prize’ for his novel Rites of Passage.

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