J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai. After internment in a civilian prison camp‚ he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel‚ The Drowned World‚ in 1961. His 1984 bestseller ‘Empire of the Sun’ won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize‚ and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg.