John Berger is perhaps the most challenging British writer of his generation. Interdisciplinary, political, and always provocative in the deepest sense, Berger's writings in a wide variety of genres and his way of life have constituted a distinctive artistic statement. Awarded the Booker Prize, Britain's highest mark of inclusion and recognition by the literary establishment, for his novel G. (1972), he donated part of the prize money to the Black Panthers and moved away from Britain. In many ways—his interest in the intersection of fiction and movies, his Marxist orientation, his retention into the eighth decade of his life of a “problematical” approach to literature and the realism central to the novel tradition—Berger has remained true to the most important intellectual trends of the 1960s, when he first began to make his name.

John Berger was born in Stoke Newington, London, on 5 November 1926, the son of S...