John Berger is an art critic, novelist, painter and author. Perhaps best known among his many works are the novel G., winner of the 1972 Booker Prize, and the introductory essay on art criticism, Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to the important BBC series of the same name. Born in London in 1926, Berger was educated in Oxford before serving in the British Army from 1944 to 1946. He then enrolled in the Chelsea School of Art and the Central School of Art in London, exhibiting work at a number of London galleries in the late 1940s. Berger has continued to paint throughout his career. While teaching drawing (from 1948 to 1955), Berger became an art critic, publishing his essays and reviews mainly in the New Statesman.
 
In 1958 Berger published his first novel, A Painter of Our Time. One month after its release the work was withdrawn by the publisher under pressure from the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The novels immediately succeeding this were The Foot of Clive and Corker's Freedom; both depicting an urban English life of alienation and melancholy. In 1962 Berger's distaste for life in Britain drove him into a voluntary exile in France and he subsequently settled in Quincy, a small village in the Haute-Savoie, where he has lived and farmed since the mid-1970s.
 
In 1972 the BBC broadcast his television series Ways of Seeing and published its companion text, an introduction to the study of images. In the same year his novel G., a romantic picaresque set in the Europe of 1898, won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Booker Prize. 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. Berger’s work also includes poetry, biography and sociological studies. In recent essays he has written of photography, art, politics, and memory.