British author J.G. Ballard, famed for novels such as Crash and Empire of the Sun, has died at age 78.

The writer had been ill "for several years" according to his agent Margaret Hanbury and passed away on Sunday. He had been battling prostate cancer since 2006.

Both of his most famous novels were made into movies.

Crash, about car accident sex fetishists, was adapted to the screen by Canadian director David Cronenberg in 1996, while the autobiographical Empire of the Sun, starring a young Christian Bale, became a 1987 Steven Spielberg movie.

Often regarded as a science fiction writer with a dystopian view of the world, Ballard insisted that his works were ways of "picturing the psychology of the future."

Born in 1930 in the International Settlement of Shanghai, China, Ballard's three years at an internment camp run by the Japanese during the Second World War would form the basis of Empire of the Sun, a fictionalized account of his time there.

"I have — I won't say happy — not unpleasant memories of the camp," recalled Ballard in one interview.

"I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"

Became RAF pilot and trained in Moose Jaw

He later moved to Britain in 1949 and studied medicine at Cambridge, intending to become a psychiatrist.

In 1951, his short story The Violent Noon won a crime story competition and was published in the student newspaper Varsity.

He abandoned medical studies in 1952 and switched to English Literature at the University of London.

Ballard joined the RAF in 1953 and was sent to the RCAF flight-training base in Moose Jaw, Sask. It was around that time that he also wrote his first science fiction story, Passport to Eternity.

Ballard left the RAF in 1954 and returned to England, working for a while as an assistant editor on the scientific journal Chemistry and Industry and then becoming a full-time writer in the 1960s.

Ballard would go on to write 15 novels and scores of short stories.