John Berger (1926 - 2017) was 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 was born in England in 1926 and lived and farmed in a small village in the mountains of the Haute-Savoie region of France since “self-exile” from 1962 until his death.
He was one of the most internationally influential writers of the last fifty years, who explored the relationships between the individual and society, culture and politics, and experience and expression in a series of novels, 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 art is 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.
Lannan presents several hours of video recordings made at his home in Quincy, France in 2002 on the Lannan Podcast site.