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

When not travelling far and wide DBC Pierre divides his time between England and a mountainside in Ireland. Vernon God Little, his debut novel, won the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award, and was followed by Ludmila's Broken English and Lights Out in Wonderland. He is also the author of a collection of short fictions, Petit Mal, and a Hammer novella, Breakfast with the Borgias.