News Blog @ Wellington City Libraries

Author J. G. Ballard has died aged 78 after a long illness. He was born in Shanghai, China and spent three years during World War II with his family in a Japanese Internment camp. He returned to Britain and began to study medicine at King’s College Cambridge. Here he began his writing and in 1952 abandoned his medical studies and went to the University of London to read English Literature. After a year he was asked to leave. He  had trouble getting his work published, and tried various jobs, even joining the RAF in 1953, but staying only a year. His first science fiction short story was published in New Worlds magazine in 1956, the editor who would publish all J. G. Ballard’s early stories. His first novel The Wind from Nowhere was published in 1962, later the same year he published The Drowned World, which was a major success. 20 other novels and 22 collections of short stories were to follow, some of the novels causing much controversy. Crash, published in 1973 and adapted to film in 1996 and the Atrocity Exhibition published in 1969 and adapted to film in 2001, being just two of the controversial works. Empire of the Sun, published in 1984 and adapted to film by Steven Spielberg in 1987, is an autobiographical novel of his war years in China. His last work was his autobiography The Miracles of Life , which was published to much acclaim in 2008.