Manuscripts, letters, notebooks and even the school reports of one of the most spectacularly imaginative literary minds of the 20th century, JG Ballard, have been saved for the British public.Ballard died last year, aged 78, and is probably best known for his 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, inspired by his own childhood in a Japanese-controlled internment camp and made into a movie by Steven Spielberg.
One of the items in the archive is a school report for the 16-year-old Ballard, and extremely prescient it was too. His English tutor wrote: "He has remarkable ability and general knowledge. With greater concentration his work could be even better."
Ballard was a man of routine and, in the first instance, wrote all his work by hand, once saying he could always tell if a novel had been written on a typewriter (and later computer). One of the highlights of the archive is the far from neatly handwritten first 840-page draft of Empire of the Sun, which is a collage of crossings out, revisions, corrections and additions.
Jonathan Scott said, chairman of the AIL scheme, 'writing was not always the most financially rewarding occupation and most serious writers had decided to sell their archives – mainly to deep-pocketed US universities – as their pension.'
The culture minister, Ed Vaizey, said the government would examine whether the scheme could be extended to people who could use it while they were still alive.
Opinion
Ballard was a very famous writer and that is why this news makes it even more important. His 12 meter archive will be accessable in summer 2010, according to Jamie Andrews, the library's head of modern literary manuscripts. This discovery must be very essential for the British literacy lovers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/10/jg-ballard-archive-british-library
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