The Spire

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 Benjamin Myers was born in Durham in 1976. He is a journalist, poet, and award-winning author of numerous acclaimed novels, including The Gallows Pole (2017) - which won a Roger Deakin Award and the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction - and The Offing (2019), which was a bestseller and BBC Radio 4 'Book at Bedtime'. His most recent book is his debut story collection, Male Tears. He lives in the Upper Calder Valley, West Yorkshire.

Astounding ... So recklessly beautiful, so sad and so strange ... Holds such a place in my soul that it's more or less a sacred text. Sarah Perry