Illustration by Iddo Goldfarb

W hen JG Ballard died in 2009, aged 78, the broad outlines of his life were well known. He had published two autobiographical novels – the bestselling Empire of the Sun (1984), which draws on his teenage years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and The Kindness of Women (1992), which makes use of episodes from his adulthood, including the premature death of his wife and his experience of single-handedly raising three children. There was also a late memoir, Miracles of Life (2008), which complicated the picture set out in the novels, revealing, for instance, that unlike Jim, the hero of Empire of the Sun , Ballard had been interred in the same camp as his parents.

Ballard’s telling of his life story did little to reconcile his public image – that of a hearty, clubbable bourgeois who lived quietly in a Shepperton semi-detached – with the imaginative extremity of such novels as The Drowned World (1962), a hallucinatory vision of psychic entropy in a London submerged by rising…