Recorded in Quincy, France, in October 2002.

John Berger is a storyteller, essayist, novelist, screenwriter, dramatist and critic, whose body of work embodies his concern for, in Geoff Dyer’s words, “the enduring mystery of great art and the lived experience of the oppressed.”

He is one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years, who has explored the relationships between the individual and society, culture and politics and experience and expression in a series of novels, book works, essays, plays, films, photographic collaborations and performances, unmatched in their diversity, ambition and reach. His television series and book Ways of Seeing revolutionized the way that Fine Art is read and understood, while his engagement with European peasantry and migration in the fiction trilogy Into Their Labours and A Seventh Man stand as models of empathy and insight.

John Berger reading from and talking about his own work at his home, a working farm in the Village of Quincy, Mieussy, France, October 2002. This reading includes titles “The Passeur,” a reading of a piece by Anne Michaels, “The Existence of Animals,” “Separation,” “Twentieth Century Storm,” and “Anna Akmatova.”