JG Ballard was one of those increasingly rare writers who actually had a life before writing. He didn’t graduate with a MFA or MA in creative writing, fresh out of school.

The MFA’s and MA’s write quite well, but they’re trading on style, not substance, because they’ve never actually done anything much beyond writing.

Before Ballard got his first short story published in the late 1950s, he had survived the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, been separated from his parents, been interned in a prisoner of war camp where he lived off weevils, joined the RAF and served in Canada, been an encyclopedia salesman and even worked as a porter in Covent Garden market.

Ballard had style and substance. Like writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut, Ballard had paid his dues in the real world and his writing had a psychological and experiential depth because of it.