Tom Overton – författare

An illuminating new life of the peerless thinker, artist and author of Ways of SeeingTom Overton got to know John Berger around 2010, after he gave his archive to the British Library: a kind of homecoming to the city of his birth, after a life lived mostly in self-imposed exile in Switzerland and France. Curious about the origin of a piece of writing or art, Tom would scan something in and email it. Then there’d come a call, very early, very late. ‘Hello? Is that Tom? This is John. John Berger. Can I tell you a story?’ Tom realised he was bringing this archive back into John’s life, peering together through holes in time, remembering things he couldn’t himself. And then, at the beginning of 2017, John died.In this extraordinary new book, Overton explores the life and work of one of the great cultural figures of the last century, who came of age in a world threatened by nuclear apocalypse, and grew old in a world dominated by the idea that human life should be ordered with the logic of profit, always looking forward, never back. Berger’s work reimagined the relationship between art and technology; charted the disappearance of peasants from the world and documented migrant labour; explored with huge compassion the AIDS crisis; was trenchantly opposed to the new world order that emerged in the 1990s and the War on Terror and passionately committed to the Palestinian cause. There were so many different subjects to his work; so many precisely chosen forms. Cutting through the reverence that can build around any writer of his scope of achievement and drawing on both personal memory and a vast and previously unseen trove of material, Overton comes face to face with John Berger, showing the continued importance of a figure, whose work focused on the creating and recreating of communities past and present. For at the centre of this book, above all, is the idea that John Berger wants our company, and we need his.

In this brilliant collection of diverse works essays, short stories, poems, translations which spans a lifetime's engagement with art, John Berger reveals how he came to his own unique way of seeing. He challenges readers to rethink their every assumption about the role of creativity in our lives. Paying homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, he pushes at the limits of art writing, demonstrating beautifully how his artist's eye makes him a storyteller, rather than a critic. His expansive perspective takes in artistic movements and individual artists from the Renaissance to the present while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation. Landscapes alongside Portraits completes a tour through the history of art that will be an intellectual benchmark for many years to come.

The Underground Sea is a succinct, urgent collection of writing from John Berger's archive. It brings together for the first time his work on mineworkers and the miners' strikes and has been edited as a set of actions for today. Publication of The Underground Sea marks the 40th Anniversary of the 1984-5 Strike, at a time when people are rediscovering the necessity, power and possibilities of collective action.Including transcripts and image-essay of his rarely-seen BBC programme, Germinal; interviews and his essay 'Miners', it places itself in the heart of a Derbyshire mining village, with reflections on the everyday life of a typical pit community. Berger grapples with the politics of witness as he studies the miners' labour and the wider community shaped in service to this work. Reflecting on their precarity, he goes back to Zola's novel for hope that 'a new world is germinating underneath the ground. And when it arrives, it will crack open the earth.'

Landscapes showcases the development and practice of John Berger's unique way of seeing. Here he surveys the aesthetic landscapes that have informed, challenged and nourished his understanding of the world.Berger pays homage to the writers and thinkers who influenced him, such as Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Bertolt Brecht. His expansive perspective embraces artistic movements and individual artists - from the Renaissance to the present - while never neglecting the social and political context of their creation.

The Underground Sea is a succinct, urgent collection of writing from John Berger's archive. It brings together for the first time his work on mineworkers and the miners' strikes and has been edited as a set of actions for today: a time when people are rediscovering the necessity, power and possibilities of collective action.Including essays, transcripts, interviews and images, it places itself in the heart of a Derbyshire mining village, with reflections on the everyday life of a typical pit community.