JG Ballard - The Interview Concordance

concordance (n.) An alphabetical list of the principal words used in a book or body of work, with their immediate contexts.

JG Ballard was unstintingly generous in granting interviews and this online concordance of more than 350 interviews with Ballard is my attempt to provide a resource to explore that generosity and wisdom.

As Simon Sellars writes in his introduction to Extreme Metaphors, the excellent book of Ballard interviews he edited with Dan O'Hara:

"...Ballard sought to make new connections in the interview setting, to use the occasion as a workshop for experimentation, a test bed for later integration into his art. Nonetheless, these are experiments based on familiar patterns, for repetition is vitally important to his work (both in the fiction and in the interviews, and in the body of both combined), as a kind of linguistic hypertext that endlessly turns in on itself, erases itself and erects itself anew, providing no discernible start or end point..."

This is a companion project to my concordance of JG Ballard's published works.

The collection of interviews that go to make up this concordance has been the work of many hands, my thanks must go primarily to the many interviewers and publishers without whom this endeavour would not be possible and who are listed in the table at the bottom of this page. Particular thanks to David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Rick McGrath, V Vale and the aforementioned Simon Sellars and Dan O'Hara.

Copies of many of the interviews that make up this concordance are collected in Extreme Metaphors or can be found online in Rick McGrath's invaluable Ballard site -- see table below for links and details.

It should be noted that much of the text in this concordance are the words of people other than JG Ballard, i.e. interviewers, editors etc. Care should be taken in checking, as far as possible, what the actual source of any particular piece of material is.

In the concordance itself, keywords (in red) are displayed alphabetically. Where there is more than one occurrence of a keyword, each occurence is shown in the date order in which it appeared in an interview. The interview in question is shown by the code at the end of each line, e.g. DPri 1990 03 00 indicates an interview by David Pringle carried out in 1990, in March, on an unknown day. More details of each interview can be seen in the table below, which is organized in date order.

Obviously, this concordance is a work in progress, as we know Ballard gave many more interviews than we have been able to source. Please do get in touch if you know of any interviews we have missed, any errors, or anything else about this site: m.bonsall@gmail.com

If you experience problems loading the concordance, try the link below