John Berger (person)

Berger was born in London in 1926 and trained as a painter at the Chelsea and Central Schools of Art. He turned to criticism in the late 1940s and gained early notoriety as the New Statesman's combative Marxist art critic. He published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time, in 1958, and won the Booker Prize in 1972 for G., famously donating half the prize money to the Black Panthers. The same year, his BBC series Ways of Seeing transformed the understanding of images as political phenomena. In 1973 he moved to Quincy, a peasant village in the French Alps, where he spent the last four decades of his life participating in the rhythms of agricultural labor while writing the trilogy Into Their Labours and continuing to produce essays, stories, and criticism of extraordinary range. He died in 2017.