J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard was a highly regarded English author, known for his works in both fiction and non-fiction. Born in Shanghai, China, in 1930, Ballard experienced the bombing of Pearl Harbor during the Second World War, an event that would later influence his writing. After spending time in a civilian prison camp, he and his family relocated to England in 1946. Ballard studied medicine in Cambridge for two years before embarking on a career as a copywriter, and later working as a Covent Garden porter. His writing is characterized by its straightforward style, but often contains unusual and unique stories.

Ballard's career as an author began in earnest with the publication of his first short story in 1956, and he would go on to write over 100 books over the course of his life. Early in his career, Ballard was associated with the New Wave of science fiction, with apocalyptic novels such as "The Drowned World" (1962), "The Burning World" (1964), and "The Crystal World" (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Ballard shifted his focus to shorter, more experimental works, such as "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1970), which drew comparisons to the work of postmodernist writers like William S. Burroughs.

Ballard's most notable work is perhaps his relatively conventional war novel, "Empire of the Sun" (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The novel was adapted into a film of the same name by Steven Spielberg in 1987. Ballard's writing is known for its distinctiveness, and has given rise to the term "Ballardian," which is defined by the Collins English Dictionary as "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments." The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Ballard's work as being occupied with "eros, thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".