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.

Aimée de Jongh is an Eisner-nominated comic author and animator from the Netherlands. At the age of 22, Aimée's career in comics took off with the popular daily series Snippers for the Dutch newspaper Metro. At 25, she then published her first graphic novel The Return of the Honey Buzzard, which won the Prix Saint-Michel and was adapted to a live-action film. Her international breakthrough came when Blossoms in Autumn was released, a graphic novel about elderly love, written by Belgian comic author Zidrou. In 2019, Aimée published her autobiographical comic TAXI!, about four intriguing taxi rides she made. Aimée's most well known graphic novel is the award winning and Eisner nominated Days of Sand (Jours de Sable).