Marlborough LitFest hosts an annual Golding Speaker to highlight the town’s long connection with the Nobel Laureate and Booker Prize winner, William Golding, at an event sponsored by William Golding Limited. Golding grew up in Marlborough, attended Marlborough Grammar School, and later used Marlborough (renamed as Stillbourne) as the setting for his novel The Pyramid. In 2012 William Golding Limited sponsored the first Golding Speaker and enabled the festival to invite major literary figures to Marlborough the opening, headline festival event.
Subsequent Golding Speakers have included Sir Alan Hollinghurst, Linda Grant, Sebastian Barry, Ali Smith, Elif Shafak, Ben Okri, Rose Tremain, Will Self, Lionel Shriver, Louis de Bernieres, Fay Weldon and Howard Jacobson.
Awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983, the coveted Booker Prize in 1980, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, William Golding’s writing continues to touch every country in the world and is today read in more than 35 languages. He was knighted by the Queen in 1988, and his ‘you-must-have-read-this’ classic novel Lord of the Flies is a global phenomenon.
In addition to 12 novels, Golding also wrote plays, many essays and reviews, several short stories, some poems, and a travel book about Egypt. Many of his attempts at other works survive in manuscript or typescript. Born in Cornwall in 1911, he seems to have known from childhood that he wanted to be a writer. His first published work appeared when he was twenty-three. Read more about Golding’s early life.
‘Words may, through the devotion, the skill, the passion and the luck of writers, prove to be the most powerful thing in the world’.
William Golding, Nobel Lecture, 1983