William Golding William Golding Sir William Gerald Golding, (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel "Lord of the Flies", he won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel "Rites of Passage", the first book in what became his sea trilogy, "To the Ends of the Earth". Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, "The Times" ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
The Lord of the Rings inspired, and continues to inspire, artwork, music, films and television, video games, board games, and subsequent literature. Award-winning adaptations of "The Lord of the Rings" have been made for radio, theatre, and film. In 2003, it was named Britain's best novel of all time in the BBC's The Big Read. Thousands of years before the events of the novel, the Dark Lord Sauron had forged the One Ring to rule the other Rings of Power and corrupt those who wore them: the nine leaders of Men, the three of Elves and the seven of Dwarves. Sauron was defeated by an