J.G. Ballard

British · 1930 to 2009

Born James Graham Ballard on November 15, 1930, in the International Settlement of Shanghai, the son of a textile executive and his wife, Ballard spent his first sixteen years in a city of extremes, colonial privilege beside crushing poverty, and watched it fracture into war. When Japan invaded in 1941 the family was eventually interned at the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Center outside the city, where the teenage Ballard spent nearly three years amid hunger, disease, and the wreckage of abandoned aircraft, a landscape that would resurface, transfigured, throughout his fiction. Repatriated to England in 1946, he found the country's grey, rationed ordinariness a stranger dislocation than anything in Shanghai. He read medicine at King's College, Cambridge, drawn to the dissecting room's unsentimental candour about the body, before switching to English at Queen Mary College and training briefly as an RAF pilot in Saskatchewan, where he first discovered American science fiction magazines in a base library. He married Helen Mary Matthews in 1955 and began publishing short stories in New Worlds, emerging as a central figure of Britain's science fiction New Wave with catastrophe novels like The Drowned World (1962) and The Drought (1965), interior disasters as much as ecological ones. His wife died suddenly of pneumonia on a family holiday in 1964, leaving him to raise their three children alone in the Surrey suburb of Shepperton, the flat, motorway-threaded landscape that became his fictional territory for the rest of his life. The experimental fragments of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) led directly into Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975), a run of books that fused suburban banality with technological violence and made 'Ballardian' a word of its own. Empire of the Sun (1984), his semi-autobiographical account of the Lunghua camp, brought him his widest readership and a Booker shortlisting. Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2006, he wrote the memoir Miracles of Life before dying in London on April 19, 2009, at the age of seventy-eight.