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 Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections. She was born in Cairo, Egypt and spent her childhood there. She came to England at the age of twelve, in 1945, and went to boarding school in Sussex before reading Modern History at Oxford. Lively has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the 1987 Booker Prize for her acclaimed novel Moon Tiger . She is also a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year's Honours List, and DBE in 2012.