J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, where his father was a businessman. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Ballard and his family were placed in a civilian prison camp. They returned to England in 1946. After two years at Cambridge, where he read medicine, Ballard worked as a copywriter and Covent Garden porter before going to Canada with the RAF. He started writing short stories in the late 1950s, while working on a scientific journal. His first major novel, The Drowned World, was published in 1962. His acclaimed novels include The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash (filmed by David Cronenberg), High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, The Kindness of Women (the sequel to Empire of the Sun), Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People and Kingdom Come. His autobiography, Miracles of Life, was published to great acclaim in 2008. J. G. Ballard died in 2009.