Acclaimed author JG Ballard died yesterday after a lengthy battle with illness. The award-winning novelist and short story writer, best known for Empire of the Sunabout his childhood struggle to survive in a Chinese internee camp, was ill "for several years", his agent Margaret Hanbury said.
Despite regularly being referred to as a science fiction writer, Ballard says what he was really doing was “picturing the psychology of the future”. In a prolific career, the 78-year-old attracted critical acclaim and controversy in equal measure for his work.
Born in Shanghai, China, he was educated at Cambridge University before becoming an RAF pilot, advert agency copywriter, encyclopaedia salesman and assistant editor of scientific journal Chemistry and Industry.
Arriving in Britain, he built up a passionate readership, particularly after Empire of The Sun, a fictionalised account of his childhood, was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1987. The book tells the story of a boy's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai, describing his experiences of starvation, survival and death marches. He said of his childhood: "I have – I won't say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"
Director David Cronenberg also brought Ballard's controversial 1973 book Crashto the screen in 1996.
– (PA)