The acclaimed and influential British author JG Ballard died on 19 April, 2009.

He was best known for his novels Crash (1973) and Empire of the Sun (1984), which were made into films by David Cronenberg and Steven Spielberg respectively.

His dark and often disturbing books won him a cult following, though his wider influence was so great that the term ‘Ballardian’ became an entry in the Collins English Dictionary.

Between 1961 and 2006 he published 19 novels and nearly as many short story collections. Shortly before his death he had published Miracles of Life, an autobiography that recounted his troubled upbringing in Shanghai.

He was born in a British and American district of the Chinese city on 15 November, 1930. His father worked there for a British textiles firm. The family endured the Second Sino-Japanese War and then the Second World War, during which young James Graham, his parents and sister were captive in a Japanese internment camp.

The traumatic experience had a profound effect on him which resonated through his work, most obviously in Empire of the Sun, a fictionalised retelling of the ordeal, but also in the generally bleak and dystopian mood of his work.

After the war his family moved to England where he completed his education, studying medicine at King's College, Cambridge. He also wrote short stories themed around the burgeoning science of psychoanalysis and won a university prize. After this success he abandoned medicine and moved to the University of London to read English Literature, though he struggled to get published for several years.

In 1953 he joined the RAF and was stationed in Canada where he discovered science fiction. Within three years he was regularly appearing in New Worlds where even then his avant-garde work caused controversy.

After leaving the scientific journal where he worked as an assistant editor, he started writing full-time in the 1960s, his first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, being published in 1961. The move to professionalism was a successful one and he was able to provide for his family. However, in 1964, his wife of nine years, Mary, died of pneumonia, leaving him to care for their three children.

After this his work took a dark turn. The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) was the subject of an obscenity trial and ended up being pulped by the publisher, while Crash took on the unsettling subject matter of people deriving sexual pleasure from car crashes. But amid the controversy caused by these books, Ballard’s literary reputation was secured.

JG Ballard’s influence has since spread beyond the world of books and he became an important figure for several alternative music acts, including Joy Division, Gary Numan, Manic Street Preachers and latterly Klaxons who have all borrowed titles, extracts and samples from Ballard.

Upon his death at the age of 78 after a long battle with cancer, JG Ballard was described as a “giant on the world literary scene”. He was survived by his three children, James, Fay and Beatrice, and his partner Claire Walsh.