Bestselling author JG Ballard died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. The award-winning novelist, widely acclaimed for books including Crash and Empire of the Sun, was 78.

Bestselling author JG Ballard died yesterday after a long battle with cancer.

The award-winning novelist, widely acclaimed for books including Crash and Empire of the Sun, was 78.

Born and raised in Shanghai's international settlement, James Graham Ballard drew on his colourful life experience to portray imaginative and often deeply disturbing worlds, becoming one of Britain's most celebrated modern writers.

Despite being diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer in 2006, he kept well enough to pen an autobiography, Miracles of Life, in 2008.

Much of Ballard's earlier writing was influenced by his remarkable experiences, with Empire of the Sun depicting the horrors he witnessed as a child inmate of a Japanese prison camp during the Second World War. Steven Spielberg turned the 1984 novel into a film, starring John Malkovich and Miranda Richardson alongside a youthful Christian Bale, who played the author as a child.

The book tells a fictionalised version of Mr Ballard's life in Japanese-occupied wartime Shanghai, describing his experiences of starvation, survival and death marches.

Despite the trials he endured, Ballard later said of his childhood: "I have - I won't say happy - but not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time."

Though some critics have accused Mr Ballard of employing shock tactics in his writing - particularly in the novel Crash, which follows a group of characters who get sexual thrills from watching traffic accidents - millions of readers enjoyed the fruits of a career that spanned five decades.

After moving to Britain permanently in 1960, Cambridge-educated Ballard gave up his job editing scientific journals to focus on writing full-time. In the years that followed he produced enduring and avant garde science fiction, with much of his oeuvre examining dystopian futuristic worlds.

When his wife Mary died in 1964, also of cancer, Mr Ballard was left to bring up the couple's three children, James, Faye and Bea, by himself.

His writing took on a darker and more outlandish tone, leading to an obscenity trial over his experimental collection, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969). As part of his work at the time of the book's publication, Ballard organised an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory in London, provoking some furious responses.

Despite such controversies, Ballard continued to enjoy success as one of the most innovative modern writers in the English language.