Today is a sad day in the world of British literature, one of its giants passed away in the morning of April 19th 2009. JG Ballard was one of Britain’s most influential writers of the twentieth, indeed the twenty-first century. Many an author owes a debt of gratitude to a man who plumbed into topics that no one had dared write before.

My first encounter with JG Ballard’s work was not through his books, indeed some of his most seminal work had been written at least a decade before I was born. Instead it was through the film, Empire of the Sun – directed by Steven Spielberg. I don’t remember the year I first saw it but it was in the early ‘90s on one of those rare occasions where I was allowed to stay up. That film stuck with me for years to come, its haunting narrative of a time and experience I could not possibly understand.

In 1999 I found out the film had been based on a book, Empire of the Sun by JG Ballard. From that point onwards there was no going back on this discovery as I moved on to The Kindness of Women and then discovered his dystopian or more accurately Ballardian novels turned a locked door in me.

My intrigue with the built environment and society within that was something I felt was best kept private, as it was quite a weird thing to be interested in – or so I thought. As it turns out, much of the fiction that JG Ballard penned struck at the very core of what I sometimes caught only a glimpse of in my travels, but in which he burrowed out a mine full of veritable detail and semblance of vision and structure.

For me, Ballard was not a science fiction writer, but rather an observer, an astutely aware person of the interaction between humankind, technology and our environment. Prophetic he may not be in the strictest sense, but he always struck at the core of something somewhat uneasy and unspoken in society.

I know I will greatly miss his work, and I for one am indebted for his contribution he has made on my literary journey, and those others who cite him as influential that too have gone on to be great writers themselves.

My only wish is that he was well enough in February last year to see him at the Southbank Centre, alas his illness prevented him from being able to host the evening. But he did write, and in those words we found inspiration so deeply inseparable from a man with such vision and understanding.

Thank you.

JG Ballard – 1930-2009