Author J.G. Ballard dies at 78

By Peter Griffiths

LONDON (Reuters) - British author J.G. Ballard, whose novel "Empire of the Sun" vividly portrayed his childhood imprisonment in wartime Shanghai and was adapted into a Hollywood film, died on Sunday, his agent said. He was 78.

His agent Margaret Hanbury described Ballard, who had been suffering from prostate cancer, as a "giant on the world literary scene." He died at the riverside home west of London where he had lived since the 1960s.

"His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels which have been published all over the world," Hanbury said.

"Empire of the Sun" was based on Ballard's privileged childhood with his expatriate parents in China and their subsequent detention in a prison camp after the Japanese invasion during World War Two.

He recalled how his parents' rich friends lost their chauffeur-driven cars and ended up "scrambling for a piece of sweet potato."

Director Steven Spielberg adapted the book for the big screen and it was nominated for six Oscars. Ballard would later write in his memoirs that his early, often violent, experiences shaped all his later work.

"In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the postwar world," Ballard wrote. "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."

Born in Shanghai in 1930, Ballard enjoyed a comfortable life with his parents -- his father ran a successful textiles company -- before their world was turned upside down by the war.