John Carey is Emeritus Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, a distinguished critic, reviewer, broadcaster, Booker judge and the author of many books, including studies of Donne, Dickens and Thackeray. His celebrated polemic What Good are the Arts? (2005) provoked much debate and discussion.

A regular critic on BBC2's Newsnight Review as well as chief book reviewer for the London Sunday Times, he also edited The Faber Book of Reportage, The Faber Book of Science and The Faber Book of Utopias. His most recent work is the acclaimed biography of Nobel Prize-winning novelist William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (2009).

John divides his time between a home in Oxford and converted 18th century farm cottages in the Cotswalds. His interests, other than ‘writing to stimulate and involve the general reader’, are keeping bees and printmaking.

Website: www.johncarey.org

BOOKS

In 1953, William Golding was a provincial schoolteacher, writing books in his breaks, lunch hours and holidays. His work had been rejected by every publisher he sent it to - until an editor at Faber pulled his manuscript off the rejection pile.

This was to become Lord of the Flies, a book that would sell in its millions and bring Golding worldwide recognition. Drawing almost entirely on materials that have never before been made public, John Carey sheds new light on Golding.

Through hundreds of letters, unpublished works and Golding’s intimate journals, Carey draws a revelatory and definitive portrait of an extraordinary man. In an absorbing and compelling narrative, he reveals a many-sided figure: a war-hero, a reclusive depressive who considered himself a ‘monster’, a family man, a victim of fears and phobias who battled against alcoholism, and a writer who trusted the imagination above all things.

John Carey talks about  William Golding on The Book Show