Collection: John Berger

John Berger (1926–2017) was born in London and educated at Oxford, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and the Chelsea School of Art. After serving in World War II, he became a painter, an art teacher, and eventually an art critic. His first novel, A Painter of Our Time, appeared in 1958, and his first collection of essays on art, Permanent Red: Essays in Seeing, in 1960, but Berger became much more widely known in 1972, the year his novel G. was awarded the Booker Prize and he hosted the four-part Ways of Seeing on BBC TV. In 1974, he moved away from Britain to a small town in the French Alps—a region that would make its way into several of his books, including the trilogy of novels Into their Labours. In addition to his many books of fiction and nonfiction, Berger was a prolific visual artist, a filmmaker, and a translator of, among others, Bertolt Brecht and Aimé Césaire.