JG Ballard dies six days before my father. He is 78, renowned for the surgical prose of his novels and the ordinariness of the life he chose for himself after enduring the internment camp at Lunghua, 1943-1945. His last book is a memoir, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008)

Augusto Boal dies on the Saturday following my father’s death a week before. He is seventy-eight. Boal is Brazilian, he went into exile around the time of the anti-revolution, the military coup, of 1964, following Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Argentina. Boal shares the characteristic with my father

– Yinka Shonibare, The Confession, 2007