The Illuminated Man

A very timely book, and one that I hope will introduce new readers to a writer Priest rightly calls one of the greatest of the 20th century. * The Sunday Times *
The best account yet of the life of one of the great English-language writers of the last century… Exemplary in detail and analysis, The Illuminated Mind is a page-turning portrait of an author whose work feels more bracingly relevant than ever. * The New World *
A brave and moving book. * Guardian *
A remarkable document, a series of homages of authors to each other, written with intense insight and abundant care. -- Stuart Kelly * The Scotsman *
The Illuminated Man is a miracle of a book, transcending categories and boundaries. It’s both a richly insightful and keenly sympathetic biography of a genius, and one of the most powerful accounts of love, and of the passing of a life, that I have ever read. Together, Nina Allan and Christopher Priest take us to extraordinary places, ranging from the heart of Ballard’s world and mythos to the limits of life itself. It’s an invigorating read, richly stimulating and almost unbearably moving. More than anything, it’s a celebration of the world-transforming power of literature, of the shining gift of the word and the happiness it brings, amid all life’s mysteries. Forged through tragedy and written in devotion, it is a singular work, and simply unforgettable. * Martin MacInnes, author of Infinite Ground *
A deft and necessary negotiation through the lives and masks of a writer fated to become an adjective. Twinned narratives intertwine as biographical pursuit invades and informs the complex journey of the pursuers. Legends of the master myth-maker are interrogated, confirmed and sometimes challenged. An engaging and frequently moving tribute to a writer honouring his self-imposed task to the last breath. * Iain Sinclair *
The Illuminated Man does the job. It succeeds as a tribute to Ballard and to the abiding power of literature and ideas. It is also a raw response to the inevitability of dissolution and loss, putting death at the centre, with its strangeness and banalities, and perhaps that’s Ballardian too. -- Norma Clark * Times Literary Supplement *
JG Ballard was one of the five or six genuinely contemporary UK writers of the mid-to-late 20th Century, and perhaps the only one with a completely individual internal landscape, a fully achieved escape velocity from the UK literary establishment as then comprised, and a genuine appetite for writing into the vast social, political and scientific shifts of the century. His awareness was broad yet finely tunable; his conclusions were always his own. He wanted to be aware of the real time in the universe. All of this is noted and developed in Chris Priest & Nina Allan’s biography of Ballard. Exciting, too, to see a major UK publisher investing in an unconventional turn on an often stale and trudging genre. Ballard and Priest would both have enjoyed the challenge The Illuminated Man represents to our idea of how a biography should comport itself. * M. John Harrison *