Fire Down Below

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

Kate Mosse is an award-winning novelist, playwright, essayist and non-fiction writer, the author of eight novels and short story collections, including the multimillion-selling Languedoc Trilogy, The Burning Chambers Series and number one bestselling Gothic fiction The Winter Ghosts and The Taxidermist's Daughter. Her books have been translated into thirty-seven languages and published in more than forty countries. Founder Director of the Women's Prize for Fiction, she is also the Founder of the global Woman In History campaign.