Overview

This book is about J. G. Ballard. This book is also about death, love and time travel. 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 Priest 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. In 2024, Christopher died. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasised into the bones, the same disease that killed J. G. Ballard — the man whose biography he’d spent his last months working on. 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.

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9781399417495

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Reviews

A deft and necessary negotiation through the lives and masks of a writer fated to become an adjective. Twinned narratives intertwine as biographical pursuit invades and informs the complex journey of the pursuers. Legends of the master myth-maker are interrogated, confirmed and sometimes challenged. An engaging and frequently moving tribute to a writer honouring his self-imposed task to the last breath. * Iain Sinclair * The Illuminated Man is a miracle of a book, transcending categories and boundaries. It’s both a richly insightful and keenly sympathetic biography of a genius, and one of the most powerful accounts of love, and of the passing of a life, that I have ever read. Together, Nina Allan and Christopher Priest take us to extraordinary places, ranging from the heart of Ballard’s world and mythos to the limits of life itself. It’s an invigorating read, richly stimulating and almost unbearably moving. More than anything, it’s a celebration of the world-transforming power of literature, of the shining gift of the word and the happiness it brings, amid all life’s mysteries. Forged through tragedy and written in devotion, it is a singular work, and simply unforgettable. * Martin MacInnes, author of Infinite Ground *

Author Information

Christopher Priest was 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 and Hugh Jackman. In 2017 he was the keynote speaker for the J. G. Ballard & The Sciences Conference at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. Nina Allan is a novelist and critic. Her work has previously won the British Science Fiction Award and the Grand Prix de L'Imaginaire, and been shortlisted for the Hugo Award and the Prix Femina Etranger. Nina and Christopher first met in 2004. The two began living together in 2011, and talked incessantly of writers and writing for the next 13 years. Unsurprisingly, one of the names that cropped up most frequently was that of J.G. Ballard.

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