J.G. Ballard

Born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of a British business executive, he spent four years in a Japanese internment camp near the city during the Second World War — an experience he later fictionalised in Empire of the Sun (1984), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and was adapted by Steven Spielberg in 1987. His earlier novels Crash (1973), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975) depicted modern middle-class life devolving into violence, exploring the psychopathology of technology and built environments. The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) presented a fragmented, experimental narrative of media saturation. He died in London in April 2009.