The Illuminated Man

This book is about J. G. Ballard. This book is also about death, love and time travel. In 2024, Nina Allan's husband, the novelist Christopher Priest died. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasised into the bones, the same disease that killed the man whose biography he'd spent his last months working on - the cult author, J. G. Ballard. J. G. Ballard possessed one of the most astonishing imaginations of our age, and he had an intense and turbulent history: a childhood spent in the encroaching shadow of World War II, teenage internment in a Japanese prison camp - an experience famously fictionalised in Empire of the Sun. Ballard's novels are among the finest and most unusual fiction that has ever been published. Whether in the hyper-surrealism of High Rise or the erotic violence of Crash, he upended the morality and reality of our world. Christopher knew many of Ballard's friends and colleagues personally. As a young writer, it had been Ballard's stories, most of all, that had helped cement his passion for science fiction. With much of their early work published in the same magazines, Priest knew about Ballard's world from the inside. He set out to write a biography that would make people understand what he already knew: that J. G. Ballard wasn't just a cult writer - he was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. When Nina and Christopher first met, they bonded over their love for Ballard's writing, rereading his novels and stories together many times. When it became clear that Christopher would not have time to finish this biography, Nina promised him that she would complete it, patching together with her own voice the gaps that remained. If the book began as a tribute from Priest to Ballard, it is now also a love story written by Nina for Christopher. With access to never-before-seen material, The Illuminated Man explores the history and themes of Ballard's life and - with Ballardian strangeness - celebrates and mourns for those that are gone. This is the story of two deaths, three science fiction writers and one attempt to turn back time.

Christopher Priest is the author of 18 novels, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and World Fantasy Award winner The Prestige, which was adapted into the Oscar-nominated film of the same name, directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman, Scarlett Johannsson and David Bowie. His prolific career in the half-century since publication of his first novel saw him named among the inaugural Granta Best Young British Novelists, alongside Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Pat Barker and Martin Amis. His journalism and reviews have appeared in The Times, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the TLS, the Washington Post and many more. In 2017 he was the keynote speaker for the J. G. Ballard & The Sciences Conference at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He died in 2024, aged 80 years, leaving behind his partner, the novelist and critic Nina Allen.