JG Ballard has been a giant on the world literary scene for more than 50 years - Margaret Hanbury

J.G. Ballard, the author of the fascinating child's-eye war novel - "Empire of the Sun", died of cancer on Sunday - 19 april 2009.

Known as the master of the underground literature, Ballard was born in Shanghai, China, and was interned there in a prison camp by Japanese troops in 1941 — an experience he drew upon in the 1984 novel Empire of The Sun. He decided to move in Britain in 1946, where he lived until his death. As a young man, Ballard was torn between being a writer or a doctor and he struggled for years to catch on, working at an ad agency and selling encyclopedias while writing science fiction stories that few read.

His first novel - The Wind From Nowhere - came out in 1962 and sold well enough for Ballard to become a full-time writer, appreciated by the critics. Other works included the novels The Drowned World and The Crystal World and the story collection Vermilion Sands.
Although he was often classified as a science fiction author, Ballard hated the label, preferring to see himself as an author who wasn’t interested in the far future, spaceships and all that, he explained; rather he was interested in the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here.



Source: The Guardian