Geneva remembers John Berger, a century after his birth
Le Courrier marks the centenary of the British writer and critic with two portraits recalling his years near Geneva and the gesture that followed his 1972 Booker Prize.
Le Courrier has published two pieces marking the hundredth anniversary of John Berger's birth, tracing the writer's political convictions and his long attachment to the Geneva region.
One piece recalls that when Berger won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G., he gave half the prize money to the Black Panthers, noting that the Booker company's fortune had been built on the exploitation of enslaved labour in the sugar industry. The paper presents the gesture as emblematic of a writer it describes as an unconventional figure.
The second article, headlined by Le Courrier as a portrait of a "marxiste sensuel," traces Berger's move away from England in the early 1960s. He and his wife Anya left for continental Europe, which they found intellectually livelier than an island they considered, in the words of his son, Geneva filmmaker Jacob Berger, "stuck in its atavisms." The couple settled in Meyrin-Parc, Switzerland's first satellite town, on the outskirts of Geneva.
Le Courrier does not detail further biographical material in the summaries available, and this article reports only what the two pieces state.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
