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Booker Prize

William Golding won the Booker-McConnell Prize (now the Man Booker Prize) for Rites of Passage, the tragi-comic sea-faring novel of eighteenth-century emigration to Australia. David Daiches, Professor of English at Sussex University, chaired the panel, which included Ronald Blyth, Margaret Forster, Claire Tomalin and Brian Wenham.
The shortlist for that year also included Anthony Burgess's Earthly Powers, widely tipped to win. Burgess did not attend the award-giving dinner.
Subsequently Golding added two more novels, Close Quarters and Fire Down Below, to his somewhat experimental 'opener', and 'A Sea Trilogy' has been republished and serialised on television as To the Ends of the Earth.

To the Ends of the Earth

Sea Trilogy TV photo

To the Ends of the Earth is the 'Sea Trilogy' title for three of Golding's most gripping - and funniest - novels: Rites of Passage, Close Quarters, and Fire Down Below. BBC 2 broadcast a three-part television dramatisation of the trilogy in May-June 2005. The adaptation starred Benedict Cumberbatch, Sam Neill, Victoria Hamilton and Jared Harris, and was filmed partly in South Africa, near Capetown.

BBC TV adaptation of Golding's 'To the Ends of the Earth'