Novelist, playwright, and art critic, born in London, UK. After studying at the Central and Chelsea Schools of Art he began to work as a painter and a drawing teacher, but soon turned to writing. His Marxism and artistic background are ever present in his novels, which include A Painter of Our Time (1958), The Foot of Clive (1962), and Corker's Freedom (1964). G (1972), a story of migrant workers in Europe, won the Booker Prize. In later years he lived in a peasant farming community in the French Jura, where he worked on a projected trilogy, Into Their Labours, about modern peasant life, completed in 1991. Later novels include Photocopies (1996), I Could Read the Sky (1999), and Here is Where We Meet (2005).
John Peter Berger (born November 5, 1926) is an art critic, novelist, painter, and author.
Biography
Born in London, England, Berger attended St Edward's School in Oxford. Berger, O.B.E., M.C., had been an infantry officer on the western front during the First World War." Berger served in the British Army from 1944 to 1946; Berger has continued to paint throughout his career."
While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing many essays and reviews in the New Statesman.
In 1958 Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, which tells the story of the disappearance of Janos Lavin, a fictional exiled Hungarian painter, and his diary's discovery by an art critic friend called John.
In 1962 Berger's distaste for life in Britain drove him into a voluntary exile in France.
In 1972 the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images.
His novel G., a romantic picaresque set in the Europe of 1898, won the Booker Prize in 1972. When accepting the prize Berger made a point of donating half his cash award to the Black Panther Party in Britain, and retaining half to support his work on the study of migrant workers that became A Seventh Man, insisting on both as necessary parts of his political struggle.
Berger's sociological writings include A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (1967) and A Seventh Man: Migrant Workers in Europe (1975). Their subsequent book Another Way of Telling discusses and illustrates their documentary technique and treats the theory of photography both through Berger's essays and Mohr's photographs.
His studies of single artists include most prominently The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965), a survey of the modernist's career;
In the 1970s Berger collaborated with the Swiss director Alain Tanner on several films;
His major fictional work of the 1980s, the trilogy Into Their Labours (made up of the novels Pig Earth, Once in Europa, and Lilac and Flag), treats the European peasant experience from its farming roots into contemporary economic and political displacement and urban poverty.
In recent essays Berger has written of photography, art, politics, and memory;
Berger's recent novels include To the Wedding, a love story dealing with the AIDS crisis that stems from his own familial experience, and King: A Street Story, a novel on homeless and shantytown life told from the perspective of a street dog. Berger initially insisted that his name be kept off the cover and title page of King, wanting the novel to be received on its own merits.
His essays and criticism are available in many different volumes, including About Looking, Photocopies, The Shape of a Pocket, The Sense of Sight, and Keeping a Rendezvous.
Berger has three children, Yves (his son by his second and current wife, Beverly), Katya (a writer) and Jacob Berger (a director).
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