J. G. Ballard was an English novelist and short-story writer, satirist and essayist. He was associated with New Wave science fiction for post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World. In 1984, Ballard won broad recognition for the war novel Empire of the Sun, a semi-autobiographical story of the experiences of a British boy during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Ballard's journey from youth to mid-age is chronicled, with fictional inflections, in The Kindness of Women (1991), and in the autobiography Miracles of Life.