Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1992 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. Since the early 60s he's been well known as an

author who likes to dwell on the violent and horrific consequences of

unpredictable events. More recently however he's reached a wider audience

with two autobiographical novels.

The first Empire of the Son, told the story of a boy from a wealthy English family in Shanghai, forced to spend three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

The second, the kindness of women, recants how the wife of a happily married man dies suddenly, leaving him with three children to bring up.

He is J.G. Ballard.

You wrote then Jim Ballard for more than 25 years before you published anything that was remotely

autobiographical. Why did it take you so long to write about the real you?

It was a very long time to wait. I started Empire of the Sun in 1983, which is nearly 40 years after the events

I describe, and I think I was just repressing all my memories of the war. It had been, even through the eyes of an 11, 12, 13 year old,

it had been a pretty brutal, in some ways brutalizing experience. You can't help but have some of the

sort of nightmarish cruelties rub off on you.

Now these autobiographical writings have brought you much wider success as I said

than your earlier science fiction works although you don't like to call them science fiction do you?

I I've never disowned the idea of being a science fiction writer, though I know that it's a thoroughly

disreputable thing to be. I've been made to feel that many, many times, so I've always

insisted that I certainly was a science fiction writer and very proud of it.

I'm interested in the next five minutes.

I'm interested in change and it's always struck me that England as a country desperately

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