JG Ballard

Biography and exclusive video interview in association with Waterstone's Books Quarterly. Read more at wbqonline.com

James Graham Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After the attack on Pearl Harbour, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp and they didn't return to England until 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and a Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF.

In 1956 his first short story was published in New Worlds and he took a full-time job on a technical journal, moving on to become assistant editor of a scientific journal, where he stayed until 1961. His first novel, The Drowned World, was written in the same year.

Ballard was at the forefront of modern British fiction for over three decades and today is a bestselling writer of international stature. His acclaimed 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, based on his experiences in the prison camp, won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was later filmed by Steven Spielberg as a movie of the same name. His highly controversial 1973 novel Crash, in which a road accident provokes a disturbing series of obsessions in the narrator, was brought to the cinema by David Cronenberg.

His more recent work includes Rushing to Paradise, Running Wild, and the highly acclaimed Cocaine Nights, a Sunday Times bestseller in hardback and paperback, which was shortlisted for the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award. 2000 was the year that the future arrived for JG Ballard - the 21st-century has for the last four decades provided the backdrop for the visionary futurism in his novels. It was also the year of his 70th birthday.

Ballard wrote ground-breaking, challenging, apocalyptic fiction for over half a century. He was a truly unique author whose recent and older works remain fresh, shocking and exhilarating. Long after the flames of other 60s greats had been extinguished, Ballard continued to produce books that were original enough to put much new writing to shame, as he demonstrated with 2003's Millennium People, and his most recent novel, Kingdom Come.

He passed away in April, 2009, after a long illness.

Photo taken by Paul Murphy, originally supplied to accompany Simon Sellars' interview with JGB in 2006.

Fact file

Name: JG Ballard

Education: King's College, Cambridge, and London University

Date of birth: 15th November 1930 (died 19th April, 2009)

Place of birth: Shanghai, China

Current home: Middlesex, UK

Similar Authors: Martin Amis, John Wyndham, Ray Bradbury, William Burroughs