James Graham Ballard

J. G. Ballard (1930-2009) was born in Shanghai. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, his family was interned, eventually returning to England in 1946. He began studying medicine at Cambridge and worked in various professions before enlisting in the RAF and moving to Canada. His first short stories were published in 1956, and his first major novel, "The Drowned World," came out in 1962, followed by "The Crystal World" in 1966. He was considered a leading figure of the New Wave of British science fiction, although his work far exceeded the genre's boundaries. His novels received numerous accolades and awards, and many were adapted into films, such as "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1969) by Jonathan Weiss, the provocative, fetishistic "Crash" (1973) by David Cronenberg, and "Empire of the Sun" (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of life in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai during World War II, by Steven Spielberg. This book was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and firmly established his reputation with the general public. His later works, such as "Cocaine Nights" (1996), "Super-Cannes" (2000, Commonwealth Writers' Prize), and "Millennium People" (2003), received enthusiastic reviews from the international press and were also honored with awards and distinctions. He passed away on April 19, 2009, after battling prostate cancer, which had been diagnosed three years earlier, at the age of 78.