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".
Lord of the World is not as well known as the dystopian writings of Evgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, and Aldous Huxley, "Lord of the World" continues to have many admirers—especially among Conservative and Traditionalist Catholics. In a 2005 essay, Joseph Pearce wrote that, while Orwell and Huxley's novels are "great literature", they "are clearly inferior works of prophecy." Pearce explains that while "the political dictatorships" that inspired Huxley and Orwell "have had their day", "Benson's novel-nightmare... is coming true before our very eyes." Pearce elaborates, The world depicted in "Lord of the World" is one where creeping secularism and godless humanism have triumphed over