267- ] Enlish Literature - Julian Barnes

267- ] English Literature

Julian Barnes 

British author and critic 

Julian Barnes lives with his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, in an elegant house with a beautiful garden in north London. The long library where the interview was conducted is spacious and quiet. Overlooking the garden, it has floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, a comfortable sofa and chairs, an exercise bike in a corner (“for the winter”), and a huge billiard table. On the walls are a series of cartoon portraits of writers by Mark Boxer—Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Philip Roth, V. S. Pritchett, among others— “some because they are very good cartoons, others because I admire the writers.” There is a superb photograph of George Sand in middle age, taken by Nadar in 1862, and a short original letter by Flaubert, a present from Barnes’s publishers when they had sold one million copies of his books in paperback. Barnes works down the corridor in a yellow-painted study with an enormous three-sided desk, which holds his typewriter, word processor, books, files, and other necessities, all of which he can reach with a swivel of his chair.

Barnes was born in Leicester in 1946 and soon after the family moved to London, where he has lived ever since. He was educated at the City of London School and Magdalen College, Oxford. After university he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary and then read for the bar, while writing and reviewing for various publications. His first novel, Metroland, was well received when it was published in 1980, but it was his third book, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), that established his reputation as an original and powerful novelist. Since then he has produced six novels, including A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters(1989) and The Porcupine (1992); a collection of short stories, Cross Channel (1996); and Letters from London (written when he was The New Yorker’s London correspondent). At the time of the interview his latest novel, Love, etc. had just been published in England to good reviews; it will be published in the States in February of 2001.

Tall and handsome and very fit, Barnes looks ten years younger than his fifty-four years. His well-known courtesy and charm are enhanced by acute intelligence and mordant wit. From the beginning, a passionate love of France and French literature, specifically Flaubert, has informed his work. Reciprocally, he is one of the best-loved English writers in France, where he has won several literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Flaubert’s Parrot, and the Prix Femina for Talking It Over. He is an officer of L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

INTERVIEWER

You are very European, which is unusual for an English writer, but also very English, especially to a foreigner. In France, for example, they think of you as quintessentially English. Where do you place yourself?

JULIAN BARNES

I think you are right. In Britain I’m sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence. But if you try that line in Europe, especially in France, they say, Oh, no! You’re so English! I think I’m probably anchored somewhere in the Channel.

INTERVIEWER

Sartre wrote an essay called “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?” What is literature for you?

BARNES

There are many answers to that question. The shortest is that it’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that, literature is many things, such as delight in, and play with, language; also, a curiously intimate way of communicating with people whom you will never meet. And being a writer gives you a sense of historical community, which I feel rather weakly as a normal social being living in early twenty-first-century Britain. For example, I don’t feel any particular ties with the world of Queen Victoria, or the participants of the Civil War or the Wars of the Roses, but I do feel a very particular tie to various writers and artists who are contemporaneous with those periods and events.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean by “telling the truth”?

BARNES

I think a great book—leaving aside other qualities such as narrative power, characterization, style, and so on—is a book that describes the world in a way that has not been done before; and that is recognized by those who read it as telling new truths—about society or the way in which emotional lives are led, or both—such truths having not been previously available, certainly not from official records or government documents, or from journalism or television. For example, even people who condemned Madame Bovary, who thought that it ought to be banned, recognized the truth of the portrait of that sort of woman, in that sort of society, which they had never encountered before in literature. That is why the novel was so dangerous. I do think that there is this central, groundbreaking veracity in literature, which is part of its grandeur. Obviously it varies according to the society. In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art.

INTERVIEWER

Literature, then, can take a lot of forms—essays, poetry, fiction, journalism, all of which endeavor to tell the truth. You already were a very good essayist and journalist before you started to write fiction. Why did you choose fiction?

BARNES

Well, to be honest I think I tell less truth when I write journalism than when I write fiction. I practice both those media, and I enjoy both, but to put it crudely, when you are writing journalism your task is to simplify the world and render it comprehensible in one reading; whereas when you are writing fiction your task is to reflect the fullest complications of the world, to say things that are not as straightforward as might be understood from reading my journalism and to produce something that you hope will reveal further layers of truth on a second reading.

INTERVIEWER

Did you want to be a writer at an early age?

BARNES

Not at all. It is an abnormal thing to want to be an artist, to practice an art. It is comparatively normal to practice an interpretative art. But to actually make things up is not something that, well, usually runs in families or is the recommendation of a career master.

INTERVIEWER

Yet England has produced some of the greatest writers, and perhaps the greatest literature, of the world.

BARNES

That is a separate truth. But there is nothing when you are growing up, even as a reasonably well-educated person, to suggest that you have an authority to be more than, say, a reader, an interpreter, a consumer of art—not a producer of it. When I became a passionate reader in my teens I thought writing was something that other people did. In the same way, when I was four or five I wanted to be an engine driver, but I knew that this was something other people did. I come from a family of schoolteachers—both my parents were teachers—so there were books in our house, the word was respected, but there was no notion that one should ever aspire to write, not even a textbook. My mother once had a letter published in the London Evening Standard and that was the maximum literary output in our family.

266- ] English Literature - Julian Barnes

266- ] English Literature

Julian Barnes

British author and critic

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh (having married Pat Kavanagh). In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories, as well as two memoirs and a nonfiction book, The Man in the Red Coat, about people of Belle Époque Paris in the arts.

In 2004, he became a Commandeur of L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize.

Early life

Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. Both of his parents were French teachers. He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination".

In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the "Metroland" of his first novel. He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages. After graduation, he worked for three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he has said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff." From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer.

Career

His first novel, Metroland, published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris, France, as a student, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth.

His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with his second wife's past. Barnes's breakthrough novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984), departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical-style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. About Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

In 1986, Barnes published Staring at the Sun, a novel about a woman growing to maturity in postwar England and dealing with issues of love, truth, and mortality. In 1989, Barnes published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a nonlinear novel that uses a variety of writing styles to call into question perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.

During the 1980s, Barnes wrote four crime novels under the name "Dan Kavanagh" (Barnes had recently married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh). The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. Duffy is notable because he represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes has said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". While Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh novels typically took less than two weeks each to put to paper—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way".

During the 1990s, Barnes wrote several additional novels and works of journalism. In 1991, he published Talking It Over, about a contemporary love triangle, in which the three characters take turns to talk to the reader, reflecting on common events. This was followed by a sequel published in 2000 called Love, etc, which revisited the characters ten years on. Barnes's novel The Porcupine (1992) again deals with a historical theme as it depicts the trial of Stoyo Petkanov, the former leader of a collapsed Communist country in Eastern Europe, as he stands trial for crimes against his country. England, England (1998) is a humorous novel that explores the idea of national identity as the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight that resembles some of the tourist spots of England. Barnes is a keen Francophile, and his 1996 book, Cross Channel, is a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France. He also returned to the topic of France in Something to Declare, a collection of essays on French subjects.

In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice of Georges Simenon in a BBC Radio 4 series of adaptations of Inspector Maigret stories. Arthur & George (2005), a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, launched Barnes's career into the more popular mainstream. It was the first of his novels to be featured on The New York Times bestsellers list for Hardback Fiction.

Barnes's 11th novel, The Sense of an Ending, published by Jonathan Cape, was released on 4 August 2011. In October of that year, the book was awarded the Man Booker Prize. The judges took 31 minutes to decide the winner and head judge, Stella Rimington, said that The Sense of an Ending was a "beautifully written book" and the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century." The Sense of an Ending also won the Europese Literatuurprijs and was on the New York Times Bestseller list for several weeks.

In 2013, Barnes published Levels of Life. The first section of the work gives a history of early ballooning and aerial photography, describing the work of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The second part is a short story about Fred Burnaby and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt, both also balloonists. The third part is an essay discussing Barnes's grief over the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh (although she is not named): "You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . Sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed . . . I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." In The Guardian, Blake Morrison said of the third section: "Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief."

In 2013, Barnes took on the British government over its "mass closure of public libraries", Britain's "slip down the world league table for literacy" and its "ideological worship of the market – as quasi-religious as nature-worship – and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor".

In 2025, Barnes published the essays entitled Changing My Mind, in which he questions whether it is possible for the Self to change the mind, stating instead that it is the mind that changes our identity, the Self being inside the mind and not something separate from it. Furthermore, these essays contain reflections on memory, in which, developing what his brother had suggested to him – namely that memory is "an act of the imagination" – Barnes argues that "sometimes we remember as true things that never even happened in the first place; that we may grossly embellish an original incident out of all recognition; that we may cannibalise someone else's memory, and change not just the endings of the stories of our lives, but also their middles and beginnings. I think that memory, over time, changes, and, indeed, changes our mind".

Personal life

Barnes's brother, Jonathan Barnes, is a philosopher specialising in ancient philosophy. Julian Barnes is a patron of the human rights organisation Freedom from Torture, for which he has sponsored several fundraising events, and Dignity in Dying, a campaign group for assisted dying. He has lived in Tufnell Park, north London, since 1983. Barnes is an agnostic. Barnes married Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, in 1979. She died on 20 October 2008 of a brain tumour. Barnes wrote about his grief over his wife's death in an essay in his 2013 book, Levels of Life.

Awards and honours

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (January 2017)

1981: Somerset Maugham Award, winner, Metroland

1985: Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize , 1986: E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters , 1986: Prix Médicis Essai, winner, Flaubert's Parrot , 1992: Prix Femina Étranger, winner, Talking It Over , 1993: Shakespeare Prize, Alfred Toepfer Foundation

2004: Austrian State Prize for European Literature , 2004: Commandeur de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Chevalier, 1988). , 2008: San Clemente Literary Prize , 2011: David Cohen Prize for Literature , 2011: Man Booker Prize, winner, The Sense of an Ending , 2011 Costa Book Awards, shortlist, The Sense of an Ending , 2012: Europese Literatuurprijs , 2015: Zinklar Award at the first annual Blixen Ceremony in Copenhagen , 2016: Siegfried Lenz Prize , 2017: Officier in the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur

2021: Jerusalem Prize , 2021: Yasnaya Polyana Prize (for Nothing to Be Frightened Of)

List of works

Novels

Metroland (1980) Before She Met Me (1982) Flaubert's Parrot (1984) – shortlisted for the Booker Prize , Staring at the Sun (1986) A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) Talking It Over (1991) The Porcupine (1992)

England, England (1998) – shortlisted for the Booker Prize , Love, etc (2000) – sequel to Talking it Over , Arthur & George (2005) – shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize , The Sense of an Ending (2011) – winner of the Man Booker Prize , The Noise of Time (2016) , The Only Story (2018) , Elizabeth Finch (2022)

Collections

Cross Channel (1996) The Lemon Table (2004) Pulse (2011)

Non-fiction

Letters from London (Picador, London, 1995) – journalism from The New Yorker, ISBN 0-330-34116-2 , Something to Declare (2002) – essays , The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003) – journalism on cooking , Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) – memoir , Through the Window (2012) – 17 essays and a short story , A Life with Books (2012) – booklet , Levels of Life (2013) – memoir , Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (October, 2015) – essays

The Man in the Red Coat (2019) , Changing My Mind (March, 2025) – essays

Works as Dan Kavanagh

Novels

Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981) , Putting the Boot In (1985) Going to the Dogs (1987)

Short story

"The 50p Santa. A Duffy Detective Story" (1985) , As translator , Alphonse Daudet: In the Land of Pain (2002), translation of Daudet's La Doulou

Volker Kriegel: The Truth About Dogs (1988), translation of Kriegel's Kleine Hunde-Kunde  , Julian Barnes

265-] English Literature , Julian Barnes

265- ] English Literature

Julian Barnes 

British author and critic

Facts

Also Known As    Julian Patrick Barnes • Edward Pygge • Dan Kavanagh

Born  January 19, 1946 (age 79) • Leicester • England

Notable Works     “Arthur & George” • “Elizabeth Finch” • “Flaubert’s Parrot” • “Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art” • “Levels of Life” • “Nothing to Be Frightened Of” • “Pulse” • “Something to Declare” • “The Lemon Table” • “The Man in the Red Coat” • “The Noise of Time” • “The Only Story” • “The Pedant in the Kitchen” • “The Sense of an Ending” • “Through the Window”

Julian Barnes (born January 19, 1946, Leicester, England) is a British critic and author of inventive and intellectual novels about obsessed characters curious about the past. His most well-known novel is the award-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has also published many works of literary criticism and essay collections.

Early career

Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford (B.A., 1968), and worked for three years as a lexicographer on a new supplement of The Oxford English Dictionary. He began contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman in the 1970s while publishing thrillers under his Dan Kavanagh pseudonym. These books—which include Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), Putting the Boot In (1985), and Going to the Dogs (1987)—feature a protagonist named Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop turned private detective.

Novels and short stories

The first novel published under Barnes’s own name was the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982) to scrutinize his new wife’s past. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is a humorous mixture of biography, fiction, and literary criticism as a scholar becomes obsessed with the 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert and with the stuffed parrot that Flaubert used as inspiration in writing the short story “Un Coeur simple.” Barnes’s later novels include A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Talking It Over (1991), The Porcupine (1992), and Cross Channel (1996). In the satirical England, England (1998), Barnes skewers modern England in his portrayal of a theme park on the Isle of Wight, complete with the royal family, the Tower of London, Robin Hood, and pubs.

Critics thought Barnes showed a new depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004), a collection of short stories in which most of the characters are consumed by thoughts of death. He explores why some people are remembered after their death and others are not in the historical novel Arthur & George (2005), in which one of the title characters is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In 2011 Barnes published Pulse, a collection of short stories, as well as The Sense of an Ending, a Booker Prize-winning novel that uses an unreliable narrator to explore the subjects of memory and aging. The Noise of Time (2016) fictionalizes episodes from the life of Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. In The Only Story (2018), Barnes explores memory and first love as a man looks back on his relationship with an older woman. In 2022 he published Elizabeth Finch, which centers on a man whose intellectual crush on one of his teachers has a lasting impact on his life.

Nonfiction works

Barnes’s nonfiction work includes Something to Declare (2002), a collection of essays about France and French culture; The Pedant in the Kitchen (2003), which explores his love of food; Through the Window (2012), an exploration of his literary influences; and Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015). Barnes used the story of the pioneering surgeon Samuel Pozzi to explore Belle Époque Paris in The Man in the Red Coat (2019).

Barnes’s memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) is an honest, oftentimes jarringly critical look at his relationship with his parents and older brother. Levels of Life (2013)—which pays tribute to his wife, who died in 2008—is a series of linked essays. In 2025 Barnes published Changing My Mind, which makes a case for the benefits of open-mindedness. The loosely connected essays discuss such topics as books, politics, and Barnes’s post-college tenure at The Oxford English Dictionary.

Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes has written numerous novels, short stories, and essays. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love.

Barnes has received several awards and honours for his writing, including the 2011 Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending. Barnes's other awards include the Somerset Maugham Award (Metroland 1981), Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (FP 1985); Prix Médicis (FP 1986); E. M. Forster Award; Gutenberg Prize (1987); Grinzane Cavour Prize (Italy, 1988); and the Prix Femina (Talking It Over 1992). Barnes was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1988, Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004. In 2011 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. He received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in 2013 and the 2015 Zinklar Award. He was awarded the 2021 Jerusalem Prize and the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize, the latter for his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of. Also in 2021, he was awarded the Jean Bernard Prize.

264- ] English Literature - J. G. Ballard

264 - ] English Literature

J. G. Ballard 

British author

Posthumous publication

In October 2008, before his death, Ballard's literary agent, Margaret Hanbury, brought an outline for a book by Ballard with the working title Conversations with My Physician: The Meaning, if Any , of Life to the Frankfurt Book Fair. The physician in question is oncologist Professor Jonathan Waxman of Imperial College London, who was treating Ballard for prostate cancer. While it was to be in part a book about cancer, and Ballard's struggle with it, it reportedly was to move on to broader themes. In April 2009 The Guardian reported that HarperCollins announced that Ballard's Conversations with My Physician could not be finished and plans to publish it were abandoned.

In 2013, a 17-page untitled typescript listed as "Vermilion Sands short story in draft" in the British Library catalogue and edited into an 8,000-word text by Bernard Sigaud appeared in a short-lived French reissue of the collection by Éditions Tristram (ISBN 978-2367190068) under the title "Le labyrinthe Hardoon" as the first story of the cycle, tentatively dated "late 1955/early 1956" by B. Sigaud, David Pringle and Christopher J. Beckett. Reports From the Deep End, an anthology of short stories inspired by J. G. Ballard (London: Titan Books, 2023, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and Rick McGrath), could have included "The Hardoon Labyrinth"—the original edition by B. Sigaud enriched to about 9,400 words by D. Pringle—but opposition from the J. G. Ballard Estate terminated the project.

Archive

In June 2010 the British Library acquired Ballard's personal archives under the British government's acceptance in lieu scheme for death duties. The archive contains eighteen holograph manuscripts for Ballard's novels, including the 840-page manuscript for Empire of the Sun, plus correspondence, notebooks, and photographs from throughout his life. In addition, two typewritten manuscripts for The Unlimited Dream Company are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Dystopian fiction

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With the exception of his autobiographical novels, Ballard most commonly wrote in the post-apocalyptic dystopia genre.

His most celebrated novel in this regard is Crash, in which the characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become increasingly obsessed with the violent psychosexuality of car crashes in general, and celebrity car crashes in particular. Ballard's novel was turned into a controversial film by David Cronenberg.

Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection Vermilion Sands (1971), set in an eponymous desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants who provide for them. Each story features peculiarly exotic technology such as cloud-carving sculptors performing for a party of eccentric onlookers, poetry-composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos to match, phototropic self-painting canvases, etc. In keeping with Ballard's central themes, most notably technologically mediated masochism, these tawdry and weird technologies service the dark and hidden desires and schemes of the human castaways who occupy Vermilion Sands, typically with psychologically grotesque and physically fatal results. In his introduction to Vermilion Sands, Ballard cites this as his favourite collection.

In a similar vein, his collection Memories of the Space Age explores many varieties of individual and collective psychological fallout from—and initial deep archetypal motivations for—the American space exploration boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Will Self has described much of his fiction as being concerned with "idealised gated communities; the affluent, and the ennui of affluence [where] the virtualised world is concretised in the shape of these gated developments." He added in these fictional settings "there is no real pleasure to be gained; sex is commodified and devoid of feeling and there is no relationship with the natural world. These communities then implode into some form of violence." Budrys, however, mocked his fiction as "call[ing] for people who don't think ... to be the protagonist of a J. G. Ballard novel, or anything more than a very minor character therein, you must have cut yourself off from the entire body of scientific education".

In addition to his novels, Ballard made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories, including influential works like Chronopolis. In an essay on Ballard, Will Wiles notes how his short stories "have a lingering fascination with the domestic interior, with furnishing and appliances", adding, "it's a landscape that he distorts until it shrieks with anxiety". He concludes that "what Ballard saw, and what he expressed in his novels, was nothing less than the effect that the technological world, including our built environment, was having upon our minds and bodies."

Ballard coined the term inverted Crusoeism. Whereas the original Robinson Crusoe became a castaway against his own will, Ballard's protagonists often choose to maroon themselves; hence inverted Crusoeism (e.g., Concrete Island). The concept provides a reason as to why people would deliberately maroon themselves on a remote island; in Ballard's work, becoming a castaway is as much a healing and empowering process as an entrapping one, enabling people to discover a more meaningful and vital existence.

Television

On 13 December 1965, BBC Two screened an adaptation of the short story "Thirteen to Centaurus" directed by Peter Potter. The one-hour drama formed part of the first season of Out of the Unknown and starred Donald Houston as Dr. Francis and James Hunter as Abel Granger. In 2003, Ballard's short story "The Enormous Space" (first published in the science fiction magazine Interzone in 1989, subsequently printed in the collection of Ballard's short stories War Fever) was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it. The plot follows a middle-class man who chooses to abandon the outside world and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.

Influence

Ballard is cited as an important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, and by author William Gibson.[66] Ballard's parody of American politics, the pamphlet "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", which was subsequently included as a chapter in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition, was photocopied and distributed by pranksters at the 1980 Republican National Convention. In the early 1970s, Bill Butler, a bookseller in Brighton, was prosecuted under UK obscenity laws for selling the pamphlet.

 In his 2002 book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, the philosopher John Gray acknowledges Ballard as a major influence on his ideas. The book's publisher quotes Ballard as saying, "Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions." Gray wrote a short essay, in the New Statesman, about a dinner he had with Ballard in which he stated, "Unlike many others, it wasn't his dystopian vision that gripped my imagination. For me his work was lyrical—an evocation of the beauty that can be gleaned from landscapes of desolation."

According to literary theorist Brian McHale, The Atrocity Exhibition is a "postmodernist text based on science fiction topoi".

Lee Killough directly cites Ballard's seminal Vermilion Sands short stories as the inspiration for her collection Aventine, also a backwater resort for celebrities and eccentrics where bizarre or frivolous novelty technology facilitates the expression of dark intents and drives. Terry Dowling's milieu of Twilight Beach is also influenced by the stories of Vermilion Sands and other Ballard works.

In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard hailed Crash as the "first great novel of the universe of simulation".

Ballard also had an interest in the relationship between various media. In the early 1970s, he was one of the trustees of the Institute for Research in Art and Technology.

In popular music

Ballard has had a notable influence on popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk and industrial groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx and The Atrocity Exhibition... Exhibit A by Exodus, various songs by Joy Division (most famously "Atrocity Exhibition" from Closer and "Disorder" from Unknown Pleasures), "High Rise" by Hawkwind, "Miss the Girl" by Siouxsie Sioux's second band The Creatures (based on Crash), "Down in the Park" by Gary Numan, "Chrome Injury" by The Church, "Drowned World/Substitute for Love" by Madonna, "Warm Leatherette" by The Normal and Atrocity Exhibition by Danny Brown. Songwriters Trevor Horn and Bruce Woolley credit Ballard's story "The Sound-Sweep" with inspiring The Buggles' hit "Video Killed the Radio Star", and the Buggles' second album included a song entitled "Vermillion Sands". The 1978 post-punk band Comsat Angels took their name from one of Ballard's short stories. An early instrumental track by British electronic music group The Human League "4JG" bears Ballard's initials as a homage to the author (intended as a response to "2HB" by Roxy Music).

The Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers include a sample from an interview with Ballard in their song "Mausoleum". Additionally, the Manic Street Preachers song, "A Billion Balconies Facing the Sun", is taken from a line in the J. G. Ballard novel Cocaine Nights. The English band Klaxons named their debut album Myths of the Near Future after one of Ballard's short story collections. The band Empire of the Sun took their name from Ballard's novel. The American rock band The Sound of Animals Fighting took the name of the song "The Heraldic Beak of the Manufacturer's Medallion" from Crash. UK-based drum and bass producer Fortitude released an EP in 2016 called "Kline Coma Xero" named after characters in The Atrocity Exhibition. The song "Terminal Beach" by the American band Yacht is a tribute to his short story collection that goes by the same name.[citation needed] American indie musician and comic book artist Jeffrey Lewis mentions Ballard by name in his song "Cult Boyfriend", on the record A Turn in The Dream-Songs (2011), in reference to Ballard's cult following as an author.

In the 2024 Met Gala

The 2024 Met Gala dress code was "The Garden of Time", inspired by Ballard's 1962 short story "The Garden of Time".

Awards and honours

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (December 2012)

1979 BSFA Award for Best Novel for The Unlimited Dream Company

1984 Guardian Fiction Prize for Empire of the Sun

1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Empire of the Sun

1984 Empire of the Sun shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction

1997 De Montfort University Honorary doctorate.

2001 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Europe & South Asia region) for Super-Cannes

2008 Golden PEN Award

2009 Royal Holloway University of London Posthumous honorary doctorate

Works

Novels

The Wind from Nowhere (1961)The Drowned World (1962)The Burning World (1964; also The Drought, 1965)The Crystal World (1966)The Atrocity Exhibition (1970, first published as Love and Napalm: Export USA, 1972)

Crash (1973) Concrete Island (1974) High-Rise (1975) The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) Hello America (1981) Empire of the Sun (1984) The Day of Creation (1987) Running Wild (1988) The Kindness of Women (1991)

Rushing to Paradise (1994) Cocaine Nights (1996) Super-Cannes (2000)

Millennium People (2003) Kingdom Come (2006) Short story collections

The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962) Billennium (1962) Passport to Eternity (1963) The 4-Dimensional Nightmare (1963) The Terminal Beach (1964) The Impossible Man (1966) The Overloaded Man (1967) The Disaster Area (1967) The Day of Forever (1967) Vermilion Sands (1971) Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971) Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976) The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977) The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)

The Venus Hunters (1980) Myths of the Near Future (1982) The Voices of Time (1985) Memories of the Space Age (1988) War Fever (1990) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1 (2006) The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 2 (2006) The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard (2009)

Non-fiction

A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996) Miracles of Life (autobiography; 2008)

Interviews

Paris Review – J.G. Ballard (1984) Re/Search No. 8/9: J.G. Ballard (1985)

J.G. Ballard: Quotes (2004) J.G. Ballard: Conversations (2005) Extreme Metaphors (interviews; 2012)

Adaptations

Films

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970, Val Guest) Empire of the Sun (1987, Steven Spielberg) Crash (1996, David Cronenberg) The Atrocity Exhibition (1998, Jonathan Weiss) Low-Flying Aircraft (2002, Solveig Nordlund) High-Rise (2015, Ben Wheatley)

Television

"Thirteen to Centaurus" (1965) from the short story of the same name – dir. Peter Potter (BBC Two) Crash! (1971) dir. Harley Cokliss "Minus One" (1991) from the story of the same name – short film dir. by Simon Brooks.

"Home" (2003) primarily based on "The Enormous Space" – dir. Richard Curson Smith (BBC Four) "The Drowned Giant" (2021) from the short story of the same name, is the eighth episode of the second season of the Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots

Radio

In Nov/Dec 1988, CBC Radio's sci-fi series Vanishing Point ran a seven-episode miniseries of The Stories of J. G. Ballard, which included audio adaptations of "Escapement," "Dead Astronaut," "The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D," "Low Flying Aircraft," "A Question of Re-entry," "News from the Sun" and "Having a Wonderful Time".

In June 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast adaptions of The Drowned World and Concrete Island as part of a season of dystopian fiction entitled Dangerous Visions.

263- ] English Literature - J. G. Ballard

263- ] English Literature

J. G. Ballard 

British author 

James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist known for psychologically provocative works of fiction that explore the relations between human psychology, technology, sex and mass media. with the short-story collection The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which includes Ballard first became associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962). He later courted controversy the 1968 story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan", and later the novel Crash (1973), a story about car-crash fetishists.

In 1984, Ballard won broad critical recognition for the war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Three years later, the American film director Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into a film of the same name. The novelist's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles of Life (2008). Some of Ballard's early novels have been adapted as films, including Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg, and High-Rise (2015), an adaptation of the 1975 novel directed by Ben Wheatley.

From the distinct nature of the literary fiction of J. G. Ballard arose the adjective Ballardian, defined as: "resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes the novelist Ballard as preoccupied with "Eros, Thanatos, mass media and emergent technologies".

Life

Shanghai

J. G. Ballard was born to Edna Johnstone (1905–1998) and James Graham Ballard (1901–1966), who was a chemist at the Calico Printers' Association, a textile company in the city of Manchester, and later became the chairman and managing director of the China Printing and Finishing Company, the Association's subsidiary company in Shanghai. The China in which Ballard was born featured the Shanghai International Settlement, where Western foreigners "lived an American style of life". At school age, Ballard attended the Cathedral School of the Holy Trinity Church, Shanghai. Upon the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Ballard family abandoned their suburban house, and moved to a house in the city centre of

Shanghai to avoid the warfare between the Chinese defenders and the Japanese invaders.

After the Battle of Hong Kong (8–25 December 1941), the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the International Settlement and imprisoned the Allied civilians in early 1943. The Ballard family were sent to the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre where they lived in G-block, a two-storey residence for 40 families, for the remainder of the Second World War. At the Lunghua Centre, Ballard attended school, where the teachers were prisoners with a profession. In the autobiography Miracles of Life, Ballard said that those experiences of displacement and imprisonment were the thematic bases of the novel Empire of the Sun.

Concerning the violence found in Ballard's fiction, the novelist Martin Amis said that Empire of the Sun "gives shape to what shaped him." About his experiences of the Japanese war in China, Ballard said: "I don't think you can go through the experience of war without one's perceptions of the world being forever changed. The reassuring stage-set that everyday reality in the suburban West presents to us is torn down; you see the ragged scaffolding, and then you see the truth beyond that, and it can be a frightening experience." "I have—I won't say happy—[but] not unpleasant memories of the camp... I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on—but, at the same time, we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!" In his later life, Ballard became an atheist, yet said: "I'm extremely interested in religion ... I see religion as a key to all sorts of mysteries that surround the human consciousness."

Britain and Canada

In late 1945, Ballard's mother returned to Britain with J. G. and his sister, where they resided at Plymouth, and he attended The Leys School in Cambridge, where he won a prize for a well-written essay. Within a few years, Mrs Ballard and her daughter returned to China and rejoined Mr Ballard; and, whilst not at school, Ballard resided with grandparents. In 1949, he studied medicine at King's College, Cambridge, with the intention of becoming a psychiatrist.

At university, Ballard wrote avant-garde fiction influenced by psychoanalysis and the works of surrealist painters, and pursued writing fiction and medicine. In his second year at Cambridge, in May 1951, the short story "The Violent Noon", a Hemingway pastiche, won a crime-story competition and was published in the Varsity newspaper. In October 1951, encouraged by publication, and understanding that clinical medicine disallowed time to write fiction, Ballard forsook medicine and enrolled at Queen Mary College to read English literature. After a year, he quit the College and worked as an advertising copywriter, then worked as an itinerant encyclopaedia salesman. Throughout that odd-job period, Ballard continued writing short-story fiction but found no publisher.

In early 1954, Ballard joined the Royal Air Force and was assigned to the Royal Canadian Air Force flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Canada. In that time, he encountered American science fiction magazines, and, in due course, wrote his first science fiction story, "Passport to Eternity", a pastiche of the American science fiction genre; yet the story was not published until 1962.

In 1955, Ballard left the RAF and returned to England, where he met and married Helen Mary Matthews, who was a secretary at the Daily Express newspaper; the first of three Ballard children was born in 1956. In December 1956, Ballard became a professional science-fiction writer with the publication of the short stories "Escapement" (in New Worlds magazine) and "Prima Belladonna" (in Science Fantasy magazine). At the New Worlds magazine, the editor, Edward J. Carnell, greatly supported Ballard's science-fiction writing, and published most of his early stories.

From 1958 onwards, Ballard was assistant editor of the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry. His interest in art involved the emerging Pop Art movement, and, in the late 1950s, Ballard exhibited collages that represented his ideas for a new kind of novel. Moreover, his avant-garde inclinations discomfited writers of mainstream science fiction, whose artistic attitudes Ballard considered philistine. Briefly attending the 1957 World Science Fiction Convention in London, Ballard left disillusioned and demoralised by the type and quality of the science-fiction writing he encountered, and did not write another story for a year; however, by 1965, he was editor of Ambit, an avante-garde magazine, which had an editorial remit amenable to his aesthetic ideals.

Professional writer

In 1960, the Ballard family moved to Shepperton, Surrey, where he resided till his death in 2009. To become a professional writer, Ballard forsook mainstream employment to write his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), during a fortnight holiday, and quit his editorial job with the Chemistry and Industry magazine. Later that year, his second novel, The Drowned World (1962), also was published; those two novels established Ballard as a notable writer of New Wave science fiction; he also popularized the related concept and genre of inner space.: 415 : 260  From that success followed the publication of short-story collections, and was the beginning of a great period of literary productivity from which emerged the short-story collection The Terminal Beach (1964).

In 1964, Mary Ballard died of pneumonia, leaving Ballard to raise their three children, James, Fay and Bea Ballard. Although he did not remarry, his friend Michael Moorcock introduced Claire Walsh to Ballard, who later became his partner. Claire Walsh worked in publishing during the 1960s and the 1970s, and was Ballard's sounding board for his story ideas; later, Claire introduced Ballard to the expatriate community in Sophia Antipolis, in southern France; those expatriates provided grist for the writer's mill.

In 1965, after the death of his wife Mary, Ballard's writing yielded the thematically-related short stories, that were published in New Worlds by Moorcock, as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).[citation needed] In 1967, the novelist Algis Budrys said that Brian W. Aldiss, Roger Zelazny, Samuel R. Delany and J. G. Ballard were the leading writers of New Wave Science Fiction. In the event, The Atrocity Exhibition proved legally controversial in the U.S., because the publisher feared libel-and-slander lawsuits by the living celebrities who featured in the science fiction stories. In The Atrocity Exhibition, the story titled "Crash!" deals with the psychosexuality of car-crash enthusiasts; in 1970, at the New Arts Laboratory, Ballard sponsored an exhibition of damaged automobiles titled "Crashed Cars"; lacking the commentary of an art curator, the artwork provoked critical vitriol and layman vandalism. In the story "Crash!" and in the "Crashed Cars" exhibition, Ballard presented and explored the sexual potential in a car crash, which theme he also explored in a short film made with Gabrielle Drake in 1971. Those interests produced the novel Crash (1973), which features a protagonist named James Ballard, who lives in Shepperton, Surrey, England.

Crash was also controversial upon publication. In 1996, the film adaptation by David Cronenberg was met by a tabloid uproar in the UK, with the Daily Mail campaigning for it to be banned. In the years following the initial publication of Crash, Ballard produced two further novels: 1974's Concrete Island, about a man stranded in the traffic-divider island of a high-speed motorway, and High-Rise, about a modern luxury high-rise apartment building's descent into tribal warfare.

Ballard published several novels and short story collections throughout the 1970s and 1980s, but his breakthrough into the mainstream came with Empire of the Sun in 1984, based on his years in Shanghai and the Lunghua internment camp. It became a best-seller, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize and James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. It made Ballard known to a wider audience, although the books that followed failed to achieve the same degree of success. Empire of the Sun was filmed by Steven Spielberg in 1987, starring a young Christian Bale as Jim (Ballard). Ballard himself appears briefly in the film, and he has described the experience of seeing his childhood memories reenacted and reinterpreted as bizarre.

Ballard continued to write until the end of his life, and also contributed occasional journalism and criticism to the British press. Of his later novels, Super-Cannes (2000) was well received, winning the regional Commonwealth Writers' Prize. These later novels often marked a move away from science fiction, instead engaging with elements of a traditional crime novel. Ballard was offered a CBE in 2003, but refused, calling it "a Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy". In June 2006, he was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer, which metastasised to his spine and ribs. The last of his books published in his lifetime was the autobiography Miracles of Life, written after his diagnosis. His final published short story, "The Dying Fall", appeared in the 1996 issue 106 of Interzone, a British sci-fi magazine. It was later reproduced in The Guardian on 25 April 2009. He was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery.

262-] English Literature , J. G. Ballard

262- ] English Literature

J. G. Ballard

British author 

J.G. Ballard (born November 15, 1930, Shanghai, China—died April 19, 2009, London, England) was a British author of science fiction set in ecologically unbalanced landscapes caused by decadent technological excess.

The son of a British business executive based in China, Ballard spent four years of his boyhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai during World War II. This experience is recounted in his largely autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984; film 1987). The devastated city and nearby countryside also provided settings for several of his apocalyptic novels. He attended King’s College, Cambridge, but left without a degree. His first short stories appeared in the 1950s. Beginning in the 1960s, Ballard wrote longer works, including The Drowned World (1962), The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966).

With the gory images of his surreal short stories in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970; also published as Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A.; film 2000), Ballard began writing of dehumanized sex and technology at their most extreme. His novels Crash (1973; film 1996), Concrete Island (1974), and High Rise (1975; film 2015) depict 20th-century middle-class people devolving into savagery. Contrasting with this apocalyptic vision of the future were his almost wistful short stories about the decadent technological utopia Vermilion Sands; these were collected in Vermilion Sands (1971). His short-story collection War Fever (1990) contains humorously nihilistic meditations on such topics as compulsory sex and the oblivious attitudes of a media-saturated society.

Ballard’s stylistic debts to Joseph Conrad are evident in his novel The Day of Creation (1987). The Kindness of Women (1991) follows the alternately dissipated and transcendent later life of the protagonist of Empire of the Sun and is written in the same semiautobiographical vein as its predecessor. Ballard infused later works with new variations on the dystopian themes of his earlier novels. Rushing to Paradise (1994) concerns an environmentalist so rabidly committed to her cause that she becomes homicidal, and Cocaine Nights (1996) centres on an island community whose cultured lifestyle is supported by crime. Ballard deploys events of extraordinary violence in the plots of Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006), effectively exposing the foibles of his middle-class characters by documenting their reactions to the violence against a stark backdrop of shopping malls and office parks.

Ballard’s essays and reviews were compiled in A User’s Guide to the Millennium (1996). The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard was released in two volumes in 2006. An autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published in 2008.