J.G. Ballard Estate
Bea is the daughter of world-renowned author J.G.Ballard. Following his death in 2009, she and her sister became joint literary executors and co-owners of The J.G.Ballard Estate. The Estate oversees the continuing publication of Ballard’s work internationally, and the film and television adaptations of his novels and short stories.
Bea writes regularly about her father’s work, commissioned by a number of leading UK newspapers.
J.G. BALLARD biography
Novelist, essayist and short-story writer J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. Following the attack on Pearl Harbour, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. He started writing short stories in the late 1950s, while working on a scientific journal.
His first short story was published in 1956. This and many other short stories were published in science fiction magazines and were heavily influenced by the surrealist movement. The short story is seen by many critics as central to Ballard's work, originating and developing themes and obsessions that progress through into his novels. The dislocated sense of time and space in these stories is located in his childhood experience of war and provides many of the images that have become associated with Ballard's fiction: wrecked machinery, deserted beaches, crashed cars, abandoned buildings and empty, desolate landscapes - "still-life arranged by a demolition squad" as Ballard himself described his settings in an interview with BBC Radio 3 (Nightwaves, 30 October 2001). Complete Short Stories was published in 2001, and a second volume of stories in 2006.
His first major novel, The Drowned World (1962), was published in 1962. This was followed by The Drought (1965), The Crystal World (1966), The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Concrete Island (1974) and High-Rise (1975), establishing Ballard's reputation with both readers and critics as a cult avant-garde writer. His 1973 novel, Crash, in which a car-crash provokes a disturbing series of obsessions in the narrator, was made into a film by David Cronenberg.
Ballard's acclaimed and best-selling novel Empire of the Sun (1984) brought him to wider public attention. The novel drew directly on his childhood wartime experiences and won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It was made into a film by Steven Spielberg in 1988.
Cocaine Nights (1996), a thriller set in a community of expatriates living on the Spanish Costa del Sol, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. His novel, Super-Cannes (2000), a vision of corporate dystopia set in the south of France, won the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book). His novel Millennium People (2003), is a tale of violent political protest and social change. J.G. Ballard's last novel was Kingdom Come (2006). In 2008, his autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published.
J. G. Ballard died in April 2009.
links to publications & articles:
J.G. Ballard’s work is published in the UK by Harper Collins, and internationally by a wide range of publishers.
Agents for The J.G.Ballard Estate:
Literary agent: Sarah Chalfant at The Wylie Agency.
Film and television agent: Jenne Casarotto at Casarotto & Ramsay Associates: