Nobel-prize author William Golding, who grew up in Marlborough, tried to rape a 15-year-old girl in the town, according to a biography due to be published.

It happened when he was in his late teens and on holiday from Oxford university.

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

Mayor Nick Fogg has launched what he hopes will become an annual series of lectures by leading figures.

Golding, who died aged 81 in 1993 and is buried in Salisbury, was born in Cornwall and came to Marlborough with his parents, who lived on The Green. His father was a teacher at Marlborough Grammar School and his mother a leader in the suffragette movement.

From the grammar school Golding went to Oxford and although his family wanted him to be a scientist he rebelled and studied literature.

Prof Carey was given access to a personal journal and diary kept over two decades by Golding. It is from this and an unpublished memoir Golding left for his wife that Prof Carey has extracted the confession.

Golding was 18, so the year would have been 1929. The girl, identified in Carey’s jottings, as Dora, was precocious, he wrote. Golding said she fought him off and ran away as he stood shouting: “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Two years later Golding met the girl again and had, according the writer’s memoirs, lusty sex in a field although he believed she consented in some kind of attempt to discredit the family because his father was a teacher.

Golding who taught for a time 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, about boys stranded on an island.

Coun Fogg said: “I met William Golding at the funeral of Mrs Winburne, his old schoolma’am. He was as charming and erudite as one might expect a Nobel literature laureate to be.

“It is wonderful that his distinguished biographer, Professor John Carey, is coming to deliver the first Mayoral Literary Lecture.

“Doubtless he will have much to tell us about this Marlborough man of huge distinction. I’m particularly proud that this is in essence a launch of the book in Golding’s home town.”