Empire of the Sun

J. G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China. At 12 years old he was interred, along with his family, in a civilian prison camp during the Japanese occupation, an experience he would later recount in Empire of the Sun (1984). Following the camp’s liberation, Ballard returned to England in 1946 where, after a brief foray into medicine, he started his prolific writing career, which included both fiction (novels and short stories) and non-fiction. His first novel, The Wind from Nowhere, was published in 1961. Ballard’s apocalyptic visions, combined with a dark and surrealist style, make him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Beside several collections of short stories, notably Vermilion Sands (1971), Ballard’s novels include The Drowned World (1962), Crash (1973), High Rise (1975), Cocaine Nights (1996) and Millennium People (2003). He died in 2009.

William Boyd is a novelist and short-story writer. Born in Accra, Ghana, he was educated in Scotland and attended the universities of Nice, Glasgow and Jesus College, Oxford. His work has been published around the world and translated into over 30 languages. He is the author of 14 novels, including A Good Man in Africa (1981; winner of the Whitbread Literary Award and the Somerset Maugham Award), An Ice Cream War (1982, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker prize), Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet) and Restless (2006, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year). Boyd is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Tim Laing is a freelance illustrator who studied at Brighton University, where he developed his interest in working from books and short stories. He has since been commissioned by the New York Times and Wallpaper magazine, among others. For The Folio Society he has illustrated Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark (2009), several novels by John le Carré (2009) and Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (2015).