An English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with post-apocalyptic novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he focussed on an eclectic variety of short stories such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973, the highly-controversial novel Crash was published, in which the protagonist becomes sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes. The story was later adapted into a film of the same name by David Cronenberg.

He is also known for his relatively conventional war novel, Empire of the Sun (1984), a semi-autobiographical account of a young boy's experiences in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War, later made into a film by Steven Spielberg.