Cocaine Nights

J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was a businessman. After internment in a civilian prison camp, he and his family returned to England in 1946. He published his first novel, The Drowned World, in 1961. His 1984 bestseller Empire of the Sun won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was later filmed by Steven Spielberg. His memoir Miracles of Life was published in 2008. J.G. Ballard died in 2009.

James Lever was born in Bolton and educated in Oxford. He’s 38, and spent his twenties writing an 800-page novel called ‘News Sport Weather’, whose subject was ‘everything’. It wasn’t any good, and nor was it published. He lives in London, where he has worked as a comedy-writer and performer, reviewer, ghost and editor. ‘Me Cheeta’ is his first novel.