William Golding

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 turned down 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

Kate Mosse

KATE MOSSE is the number one bestselling author of eleven novels, including Labyrinth, The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist's Daughter, the short-story collection The Mistletoe Bride and Other Haunting Tales, five highly acclaimed works of history and non-fiction, including her memoir about caring An Extra Pair of Hands, and four plays. Her books have been translated into thirty-eight languages and published in more than forty countries.

The Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction and Non-Fiction, Kate is a visiting professor of creative writing and contemporary fiction at the University of Chichester, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, President of the Festival of Chichester and a Trustee of the British Library. She lives in Chichester, West Sussex.