Introducing the Collins Modern Classics, a series featuring some of the most significant books of recent times, books that shed light on the human experience ¿ classics which will endure for generations to come..

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His most recent novel was Kingdom Come, published in 2006; his autobiography Miracles of Life was published in 2008 to much acclaim. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.