Nobel prize winning author William Golding who was brought up in Marlborough attempted to rape a 15 year old girl in the town when he was in his late teens and on holiday from university it will emerge when a biography on the novelist is published.

The biography has been written by John Carey, emeritus professor of English literature at Oxford University, who will be presenting Marlborough’s first ever literary lecture on Friday September 18.

Mayor Nick Fogg has inaugurated what he hopes will become an annual series of lectures by people from the literary world.

Golding, who died in 1993 at the age of 81 and is buried in Salisbury, was born in Cornwall and came to Marlborough as a boy with his parents who lived on The Green. His father was a teacher at Marlborough Grammar School and his mother was a leader in the suffragette movement campaigning for women’s rights.

The writer went to the grammar school and then went up to Oxford and although his family wanted him to become a scientist he revolted and studied literature instead.

Prof Carey was given access to a personal journal and diary kept over two decades by Golding who disliked intensely any revelations about his personal life.

It is from this journal and from an unpublished memoir Golding left for his wife that Prof Carey has extracted the award winning novelist’s confession that during a holiday back in Marlborough from Oxford where he was studying he tried to rape a 15 year old girl.He was 18 at the time so the year would have been 1929.

The girl, identified in Carey’s jottings, simply as “Dora”, was precocious he wrote. In his own words he said she was “depraved by nature” and “already sexy as an ape”.

In the personal notes he left for his wife, Ann, Golding said he was sure the girl “wanted heavy sex” however he went on to state that she fought him off and ran away as he stood shouting: “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Two years later Golding and the girl -- who was then legally old enough for a sexual relationship -- met again and had, according the writer’s memoirs. lusty sex in a field although, he wrote, he believed she consented in some kind of attempt to discredit the family because his father was a teacher.

Golding who for a time was a teacher at Bishop Wordsworth’s school in Salisbury admitted in his memoirs that he divided his pupils into gangs with one attacking a prehistoric camp defended by another group...the theme of his best selling Lord of the Flies.