Julia Donaldson on Lord of the Flies

Best-selling children’s writer, Julia Donaldson, has named Lord of the Flies as the book that changed her life. In an interview in the Guardian, Donaldson said that Golding’s novel is ‘a horribly convincing portrait of the darker side of human nature’. Before she read it, she ‘believed in happy endings’. Donaldson cites Edward Lear as having an impact on her own writing, and thinks that Ruth Rendell’s The Tree of Hands is the most underrated book.