Writer JG Ballard died yesterday aged 78 of prostate cancer. “Despite being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006,” Chris Watt reports in the UK Herald “he kept well enough to pen an autobiography, Miracles of Life, in 2008.” BBC –putting his obituary in the entertainment section –pointlessly bowdlerizes the nature of Ballard’s illness, claiming “His agent Margaret Hanbury said the author had been ill ‘for several years’ . . . .” Ballard made no secret of prostate cancer. Others have claimed that he began Miracles of Life because of it.

Martin Amis, The Scotsman notes, has said of Ballard’s work: “He is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different, disused part of the reader’s brain.” The entrance to Ballard’s website is in funeral colors today. Someone has thought to make a way in by a copy of his homepage and has called it jgballard.com/index_normal.php I doubt he ever wanted to be that.

During World War II at the age of 12, in Shanghai, Ballard was interned for three years in a camp run by the Japanese. In this 20 mins plus interview conducted by Hari Kunzru he looks back on childhood and war.