James Graham Ballard (born November 15, 1930 in Shanghai) is a British novelist.

At the age of eleven, Ballard lived through the Japanese takeover of China. He was moved to a civilian detention camp where he spent the remainder of World War II. These experiences were described in the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (which was adapted for film by Steven Spielberg). After the war's end he returned to England. He was first educated at the the Ley's School, Cambridge, then read Medicine at King's College, Cambridge (which he abandoned after two years) and later English Literature at the University of London. He also worked as a copywriter and then was stationed with the RAF in Canada. Ballard wrote about these and later events in another semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women.

Those who know Ballard from his autobiographical novels will not be prepared for the subject matter that Ballard most commonly pursues, as his most common genre is dystopia. His most celebrated early novel is Crash, in which cars symbolise the mechanisation of the world and man's capacity to destroy himself with the technology he creates; and the characters (the protagonist, called Ballard, included) become involved in a violent obsession with the psychosexuality of car crashes. Ballard's disturbing novel was turned into a controversial, and also disturbing, film by David Cronenberg.

Particularly revered among Ballard's admirers is his short story collection "Vermillion Sands", set in an eponymous desert resort town inhabited by forgotten starlets, insane heirs, very eccentric artists, and the merchants and bizarre servants who provide for them. Each story features some especially exotic and effete technology, such as poetry-composing computers, orchids with operatic voices and egos, phototropic self-painting canvasses, and so on. In key with Ballards' most central themes, these tawdry and exotic technologies serve to bring out dark and hidden desires and schemes in the human castaways that occupy "Vermillion Sands", often to psychologically grotesque and physically fatal results. In his introduction to "Vermillion Sands", Ballard cites this as his favorite collection.

In a similar vein, his collection "Memories of the Space Age" explores many varieties of individual and collective psychological fallout--and initial deep motivation for--the American space exploration boom of the 1960's and 70's.

Several of Ballard's earlier works deal with scenarios of 'natural disaster'; most notably a quartet thematically based on the fourClassical Elements of Aristotle, featuringThe Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, "The Crystal World", and The Drought.

In addition to his novels, Ballard has made extensive use of the short story form. Many of his earliest published works in the 1950s and 1960s were short stories.

Ballard's fiction is sophisticated, often bizarre, and a constant challenge to the cognitive and aesthetic preconceptions of his readers. As Martin Amis has written: "Ballard is quite unlike anyone else; indeed, he seems to address a different - a disused - part of the reader's brain." Because of this tendency to upset readers in order to enlighten them, Ballard does not enjoy a large mass market following, but he is recognized by critics as one of the U.K.'s most prominent writers. He has been influential beyond his mass market success; he is cited as perhaps the most important forebear of the cyberpunk movement by Bruce Sterling in his introduction to the seminal "Mirrorshades" anthology. Also, his parody (or psychoanalysis) of American politics, the pamphlet Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan (subsequently included as a chapter in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition), was photocopied and distributed by pranksters at the 1976 Republican National Convention. A bookseller in Brighton had been prosecuted for selling this pamphlet in the early 1970s, under UK obscenity legislation.

Lee Killough directly cites his seminal "Vermillion Sands" short stories as the inspiration for her collection "Aventine", also a backwater resort for celebrities and eccentrics where bizarre or frivolous novelty technology facilitates the expression of dark intents and drives.

Ballard has also had a noticeable influence on popular music, where his work has been used as a basis for lyrical imagery, particularly amongst British post-punk groups. Examples include albums such as Metamatic by John Foxx, various songs by Joy Division, and Warm Leatherette by The Normal.

In 2003, Ballard's short story "The Enormous Room" (first published in the Science fiction magazine "Interzone" in 1989) was adapted into an hour-long television film for the BBC entitled Home by Richard Curson Smith, who also directed it. The plot follows a middle class man who chooses to abandon the outside world and restrict himself to his house, becoming a hermit.

• The Wind From Nowhere (1961)
• The Drowned World (1962)
• The Burning World (1964) (also The Drought) (1965)
• The Crystal World (1966)
• The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (also Love and Napalm: Export USA)) (1972)
• Crash (1973)
• Concrete Island (1974)
• High Rise (1975)
• The Unlimited Dream Company (1979)
• Chronopolis (1979)
• Hello America (1981)
• Empire of the Sun (1984, fictionalised autobiography of his adolescence in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai)
• The Day of Creation (1987)
• Running Wild (1988)
• The Kindness of Women (1991, follow up to Empire Of The Sun covering his early adulthood)
• Rushing to Paradise (1994)
• Cocaine Nights (1996)
• Super-Cannes (2000)
• Millennium People (2003)

• The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962)
• Billenium (1962)
• Passport to Eternity (1963)
• The Four-Dimensional Nightmare (1963)
• The Terminal Beach (1964)
• The Impossible Man (1966)
• The Venus Hunters (1967)
• The Overloaded Man (1967)
• The Disaster Area (1967)
• The Day of Forever (1967)
• Vermilion Sands (1971)
• Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971)
• Low-Flying Aircraft and Other Stories (1976)
• The Best of J. G. Ballard (1977)
• The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (1978)
• Myths of the Near Future (1982)
• The Voices of Time (1985)
• Memories of the Space Age (1988)
• War Fever (1990)
• The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard (2001)

• A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (1996)

• jgballard.com - unofficial site with extensive Ballard links
• J. G. Ballard at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Template:Contemporary writers
• J. G. Ballard at the Internet Book List
• J. G. Ballard's online fiction at Free Speculative Fiction Online
• On First Reading J. G. Ballard's Concrete Island & Empire of the Sun
• Open Directory Project: J. G. Ballard
• Ballardian: The World of JG Ballard. Ballard-related news, stories in the Ballardian mode, essays and reviews on Ballard and interviews with Ballard
• The Critical Exhibtion - JGB's Online Secondary Bibliography
• Guardian Books "Author Page", with profile and links to further articles by and about him.
• Spike Magazine Interview
• Over 200 scans of first and variant editions, including the suppressed 1970 Doubleday edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, plus articles, reviews, bibliographies, marginalia and the usual lineup of obsessive associations
• Yahoogroups JG Ballard discussion group