The Illuminated Man

A remarkable document, a series of homages of authors to each other, written with intense insight and abundant care.

The Scotsman

The Illuminated Man is a miracle of a book, transcending categories and boundaries. It’s both a richly insightful and keenly sympathetic biography of a genius, and one of the most powerful accounts of love, and of the passing of a life, that I have ever read. Together, Nina Allan and Christopher Priest take us to extraordinary places, ranging from the heart of Ballard’s world and mythos to the limits of life itself. It’s an invigorating read, richly stimulating and almost unbearably moving. More than anything, it’s a celebration of the world-transforming power of literature, of the shining gift of the word and the happiness it brings, amid all life’s mysteries. Forged through tragedy and written in devotion, it is a singular work, and simply unforgettable.

Martin MacInnes, author of Infinite Ground

A deft and necessary negotiation through the lives and masks of a writer fated to become an adjective. Twinned narratives intertwine as biographical pursuit invades and informs the complex journey of the pursuers. Legends of the master myth-maker are interrogated, confirmed and sometimes challenged. An engaging and frequently moving tribute to a writer honouring his self-imposed task to the last breath.

Iain Sinclair

JG Ballard was one of the five or six genuinely contemporary UK writers of the mid-to-late 20th Century, and perhaps the only one with a completely individual internal landscape, a fully achieved escape velocity from the UK literary establishment as then comprised, and a genuine appetite for writing into the vast social, political and scientific shifts of the century. His awareness was broad yet finely tunable; his conclusions were always his own. He wanted to be aware of the real time in the universe. All of this is noted and developed in Chris Priest & Nina Allan’s biography of Ballard. Exciting, too, to see a major UK publisher investing in an unconventional turn on an often stale and trudging genre. Ballard and Priest would both have enjoyed the challenge The Illuminated Man represents to our idea of how a biography should comport itself.

M. John Harrison

The Illuminated Man does the job. It succeeds as a tribute to Ballard and to the abiding power of literature and ideas. It is also a raw response to the inevitability of dissolution and loss, putting death at the centre, with its strangeness and banalities, and perhaps that’s Ballardian too.

Times Literary Supplement

An incisive and moving new critical biography of one of the nuclear age’s greatest visionaries.

LA Review of Books

A strange, poignant meditation on pain and art. The biography reads like a grand scheme gone awry – and you imagine that Ballard, more than anyone, would have appreciated the truth of that.

Observer

This is not just a book about Ballard, although it remains this first and foremost; it is also the story of the last days of [Christopher Priest], a considerable novelist in his own right, and a mediation on grief… Paradoxically, there’s also a precision about the prose that’s authentically Ballardian. This is needed to prevent Allan’s sense of loss overpowering the text. That it never does is greatly to her credit.

SFX

Priest and Allan do a remarkable job of constructing the story of Ballard’s life…They have clearly done an incredible amount of research, reading extensively the material that currently exists on Ballard and also talking to his friends, family and colleagues. The book manages to get as close to the truth as anyone is likely to… Informative and inspiring.

The Fantasy Hive

Thoroughly researched, astutely observed and formally inventive.

Locus

A strange, occasionally devastating, but in the end quite lovely dual tribute.

Gary Wolfe