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 Beach (novel) as "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord of the Flies", and the anonymous memoirs of an escaped Australian prisoner. Although set in Thailand, Garland wrote the book while living in the Philippines and in particular was inspired by similar geography on the island of Palawan . Novelist Nick Hornby referred to "The Beach" as "a "Lord of the Flies" for Generation X", and the "Sunday Oregonian" called it "Generation X's first great novel". "The Washington Post" wrote that it is "a furiously intelligent first novel" and "a book that moves with the kind of speed and grace many older writers can