Obituary: JG Ballard

JG Ballard (KC 1949, Medical Sciences), who has died aged 78, once described himself as "a man of complete and serene ordinariness" (to the disbelief of his interviewer). In fact, he was one of the most strikingly original English writers of the past half-century. Esteemed for his wayward imagination and his ability to create a distinctively Ballardian world, his fiction moved through various phases while remaining instantly recognisable.

Although best known for his 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun, his first fame, in the early 1960s, was as a science fiction writer, hailed by slightly older peers such as Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss. But within a decade or so his reputation had modulated into that of an avant garde provocateur, admired by visual artists and punk rockers. Another decade on and he reemerged as a great novelist of the second world war experience with Empire of the Sun, shortlisted for the Booker prize and winning his widest-ever public. Yet another decade on and he seemed to redefine himself as a special kind of crime writer – one with a peculiar, sinister vision of late 20th-century modernity that appealed particularly to the younger end of Britain's literary and arts scene.

And yet the "serene ordinariness" that he claimed for himself was manifest in his personal life and modest circumstances: he lived in the same small, semi-detached house in Shepperton, Surrey, for nearly half a century; he rarely travelled in his later decades, and he very seldom participated in literary festivals or jamborees.

Jimmy Ballard was the eldest child of James and Edna Ballard, who had emigrated in 1929 from Manchester to Shanghai, where he was born. His father rose to be managing director of a British-owned textile factory there, and the young Ballard grew up in the upper middle-class, quasi-colonial style of a large house in Amherst Avenue, tended by Chinese servants and Russian governesses. A younger sister, Margaret, was born in 1937, the same year that Japan invaded China. The family, like most European expatriates, were able to carry on a normal, prosperous existence, despite shells occasionally whizzing over their house in the International Settlement.

This endured until December 1941 when, immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces entered the settlement. After a year of uncertainty, in early 1943 all "enemy civilians" were interned in camps which surrounded the city. The Ballards were confined to Lunghua civilian assembly centre where they remained until August 1945.

The young Ballard grew from a naive 12-year-old to a perhaps prematurely wise 14-year-old during his time in the camp. He was never separated from his parents and sister, and the physical privations were not especially severe. Nevertheless, the contrast with their previous lifestyle was extreme, awakening in the boy a lifelong sensitivity to dislocations, sudden reversals, paradoxes, and ironies. A few months after the Japanese surrender, he was repatriated to England, a country he had never seen, together with his mother and sister (his father did not finally return to the west until after the Communist takeover of China in 1949)...

• Read the whole obituary by David Pringle in The Guardian