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Author Archive

The Real Concrete Island?

By • Dec 3rd, 2008 •

Category: architecture, features, psychogeography, speed & violence, WWII

Mike Bonsall sets out on a mission to find The Real Concrete Island, and is surprised by what he finds: ‘Ballard must have walked the same streets that years later I was to haunt with my own damaged crew. Living within sight of the Westway, which I felt must have helped form his motorway mythology, I was moved to do some geo-detective work…’


'Obeying the surrealist formula': Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard

By • Feb 17th, 2008 •

Category: archival, autobiography, Iain Sinclair, Salvador Dali, Shanghai, Shepperton, speed & violence, surrealism, visual art, WWII

Here’s a transcription of the BBC Radio Front Row review of Miracles, presented by Mark Lawson and featuring Iain Sinclair and Hermione Lee.


'Genius eye for the killer detail': Parsons, Harris & Myerson on Ballard

By • Feb 14th, 2008 •

Category: archival, autobiography, celebrity culture, Shanghai, Shepperton, Steven Spielberg, WWII

This one’s a transcript of BBC 2′s Newsnight Review segment on Miracles of Life. It features Tony Parsons, Julie Myerson and John Harris and is presented by Kirsty Wark.


Chemical Appendix: The Complete C&I Reviews

By • Aug 1st, 2007 •

Category: archival, invisible literature

From 1958 to 1964, J.G. Ballard worked at Chemistry & Industry, the journal of the Society of Chemical Industry. As we’ve already discovered, what happened at C&I codified the tropes Ballard was to return to throughout his subsequent writing career — the scientific, technical and imaginative motifs that shape the very essence of what we’ve [...]


J.G. Ballard's Experiment in Chemical Living

By • Aug 1st, 2007 •

Category: advertising, features, invisible literature, Michael Moorcock, New Worlds, Shepperton, William Burroughs

by Mike Bonsall J.G. Ballard in 1960. In the background is a poster of his ‘Project for a new novel’, made two years earlier. Chemistry & Industry … was a good place to work because, of course, the office of any scientific magazine is the most wonderful mail drop. It’s the ultimate information crossroads. Most [...]


Another Atrocity: A 'New' Work by J.G. Ballard

By • Feb 17th, 2006 •

Category: Borges, features, medical procedure, pastiche

The Atrocity Exhibition is a collection of J.G. Ballard’s most extraordinary short stories. Written in the few years following the tragic death of his wife, they are his most difficult work, representing the extremes of anguish, desire, alienation and horror. Compact and repetitive, they pick over the same questions of psychopathology, sexuality and death in [...]