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 rejected 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

Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of twelve prize-winning novels and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta's 20 Best Young British Writers. H(A)PPY, won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize and was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018; and her most recent novel is I Am Sovereign.