JG Ballard 1930-2009

J G (James Graham) Ballard, the British novelist, short story writer and major exponent of the New Wave in science fiction writing, died yesterday aged 78.

JG Ballard, originally uploaded by matthetube.

He was born in the International Settlement in Shanghai, China and later became a Japanese concentration camp internee during the war, an experience he explored in his world famous autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (which Stephen Spielberg brought to the screen in 1987 with a very young Christian Bale playing the author as a boy).

David Cronenberg transformed his most controversial novel – Crash – into a likewise highly controversial movie in 1996.

His final book – an autobiography entitle Miracles of Life – was published in 2008.