The biographer’s terminal illness and death is woven into this original and moving account of Ballard and his work The biographer’s terminal illness and death is woven into this original and moving account of Ballard and his work T he writer JG Ballard , who died in 2009, is a tantalising subject for a biographer. His extraordinary childhood in prewar Shanghai, his family’s subsequent internment in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and the death of his wife, Mary, at the age of 34, were