In April 2009, literary giant JG Ballard died after a long battle with cancer

Among the obituaries and accolades was a moving memoir by his daughter, Bea Ballard, about her idyllic childhood with the man who, she says, filled their lives with love.

When his wife died suddenly of pneumonia on a family holiday in Spain, Ballard ignored suggestions that he farm their three children out and set about raising them alone, an experience he described as ‘the most important’ of his life.

 ‘We had a lady who came in to change and wash the sheets every Friday, but apart from that he did everything, and he did it brilliantly. Our home was a nest, a lovely, warm family nest,’ his daughter Fay said.

After dropping them at their suburban school every morning, he raced home to write.

Although much of Ballard’s work dealt with disaster and depravity – his novel Crash, for example, was about the sexuality of car crashes – he was best known for his fictionalized autobiography, Empire of the Sun, the story of his childhood in war torn Shanghai which became an international best-seller and film.

Read more from Bea Ballard or a tribute from his life long friend, Michael Moorcroft.