A renowned novelist, essayist, painter, filmmaker, dramatist and critic, John Berger is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential British writers of the past 50 years.

He won the Booker Prize in 1972 for the novel G, and was also awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the same novel. His latest book of essays is The Shape of a Pocket (2003). His most well known book is Ways of Seeing (1990), which was turned into a television series by the BBC.

John Berger has written for openDemocracy on the issues of poverty, storytelling, the Iraq conflict, the 2004 US election and Michael Moore’s controversial film Fahrenheit 9/11.

John Berger’s career began in art, where he attended the Central School of Art and the Chelsea School of Art in London, going on to teach drawing in the period 1948-1955. His art has been exhibited at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester galleries in London. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career.

Born in London, he has lived for the past 20 years in a small village in the French Alps. Fascinated by the traditions and endangered way of life of the mountain people, he has written about them both in his fiction and nonfiction. Berger is a diverse and prolific artist and his commitment to democratic and open exchange is constant across all genres and throughout his work. He cites the idea of collaboration as central to his creative identity.

Recent articles

We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other.

Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives.

This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally.

Let's do so.

John Berger

A pitiless market is met by an anomic politics. John Berger dissects the official language of crisis in France.

John Berger and his family went to organise painting and drawing workshops for children in Ramallah in November 2005. Here are his reflections.

“The worst cruelties of life are its killing injustices.” John Berger on poverty, desire, storytelling, and the future’s gift to the present.

Susan Sontag, born in 1933, died in New York on 28 December 2004.