John Berger and the Loss of Rural Culture

Nine years ago today, the British writer and critic John Berger died. In 2026, we are celebrating the centenary of his birth as one of the most original, committed and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

After a successful career as an art critic and painter in post-war London, Berger decided to leave the UK and ended up in Quincy, a small town in the French Alps, close to Geneva. This is where author and poet Jorge Luis Borges is buried, a man for whom Berger felt great admiration, despite occupying the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Berger had abandoned painting to devote himself entirely to writing, a hybrid kind of writing, without borders, like the world he envisioned.

In fact, emigration was one of the themes that run through his short stories, novels, film scripts (he worked with Alain Tanner), poetry and essays, published either separately or within the same book, as in Pig Earth, the first volume of his Into Their Labors trilogy. This quote from the Gospel of St. John opens the book: “Others have labored and ye are entered into their labors” and it is worth remembering it now that we are in the Christmas season. The author of Ways of Seeing, G which won the 1972 Booker Prize, Once in Europe and Lila and Flag, was a heterodox Marxist — down to earth but also possessing a sense of transcendence.