William Golding

Plasticine Portrait Today Today is William Golding, the British author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature and left a huge mark thanks to his best-known book, “Lord of the Flies.” Golding, who served as an officer in the Royal Navy during World War II, experienced the dark side of humanity firsthand, and this experience permeates almost everything he wrote. “Lord of the Flies” features a group of children who are stranded on a deserted island and without the adult world to hold them together – they quickly descend into cruelty, violence and a tribal-like cult. Golding used this parable to expose the fragility of civilization and the violent potential that always lurks beneath the surface. The book sparked huge debates, became a modern classic and is taught in schools around the world to this day. Golding did not stop with this book. He also wrote other novels such as The Heirs of God, The Pursuit, and The White Finch, in which he continued to examine the relationship between culture and barbarism, between power and compassion, and between faith and despair. In 1983, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for his writing that “illuminates the human condition in the modern world with a clear light.” My Portrait of Palestine attempts to capture Golding’s penetrating gaze, the gaze of someone who dared to write what we all might prefer to suppress—that our society is not always stable, and that within every person there may be an ancient and violent instinct.