The Illuminated Man

This book is about J. G. Ballard. This book is also about death, love and time travel.

In 2024, Nina Allan’s husband, the novelist Christopher Priest died. He had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had metastasised into the bones, the same disease that killed the man whose biography he’d spent his last months working on — the cult author, J. G. Ballard.

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 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.

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.