11 September 1970: Ballard discusses his new book The Atrocity Exhibition, as well as a recent exhibition of crashed cars
JG Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930; for the last ten years he has lived with his daughters (he is a widower) in a rundown semi in Shepperton, with books and papers scattered around as though he is on the point of moving out. The rootlessness gives his writing an edge, a quality of observation, a feel for environment that is of contemporary fiction. He himself does not think of it so much as being rootless as being slightly out of step:
“When you think of the writers with roots I suppose you can take the great Russian novelists though I don’t know in fact how rooted in their own societies and their own time and their own landscape they really were. I get the impression Dostoevsky was a pretty edgy character. And as for Tolstoy you get the impression that he thought Earth was a pretty poor stopping place on the way to heaven. If you think of English writers writing now, without being catty or naming names, those who are the most closely wedded to England strike me as those who are weakest of all.”
Related: JG Ballard: five years on – a celebration
Related: The Drowned World by JG Ballard – archive, 27 January 1963
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