British · 1930–2009
J.G. Ballard's "Empire of the Sun" was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, drawing on his childhood internment in a Japanese camp near Shanghai. The British author also wrote speculative fiction that anticipated the contemporary world's obsessions with celebrity, disaster, and technology. Ballard's early novels imagined apocalypse through environmental catastrophe; his later work found the apocalyptic in suburban England. Steven Spielberg filmed "Empire of the Sun" in 1987.