High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! James Graham Ballard (15 November 1930 19 April 2009) was an English novelist and short story writer. He was a prominent member of the New Wave movement in science fiction, but his best-known books are the controversial Crash (1973), an exploration of automobile-accident sexual fetishism, and the autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984). The latter was based on his boyhood in Shanghai, where he was born in the International Settlement, and on his internment by the Japanese Imperial Army during the Second World War. Both novels were adapted into films, by David Cronenberg and Steven Spielberg respectively.