Up today on Ballardian, a transcript of a 1968 interview with J. G. Ballard. This is the first of three interviews, all originally published in German, which I’ve re-translated into English. None of them has been available in English before, and whilst they certainly contain plenty of familiar material, there’s also a decent amount of material not covered elsewhere, from biographical details to observations about film, Russian literature, and his own narrative technique.
This first interview is a peculiar one: seemingly assembled from the sub-titles of a long-lost interview which Ballard gave to Bavarian TV in 1968, the questions are missing. Reading it now, one has to guess what questions Ballard might be answering. But then this method is exactly the one Ballard employs in his 1985 short story, ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’, in which one is given the answers, but not the questions…
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