Skip to main content
John Berger
Information

John Berger and the 1972 Booker Prize controversy

Published

In 1972, after winning the Booker Prize for his experimental novel G., John Berger shocked the literary establishment by giving away half of his prize money to the British Black Panther movement. Find out more about the book and the controversy here

John Berger presenting the BBC series Ways of Seeing

Watch our film, 'Seeing G.'

In ‘Seeing G.’, a new film to mark the 50th anniversary of John Berger’s Booker win, Jo Hamya revisits the prize’s most controversial moment, reveals what happened to Berger’s prize money and explores the legacy and impact of his 1972 novel

Monument of the Four Moors, Livorno

Berger, Booker and the Black Panthers

Fifty years after John Berger won the Booker Prize for G. - and gave half of his prize money to the British Black Panthers - Jo Hamya casts a fresh eye over the controversy and looks for parallels between Berger’s Booker speech and the prize-winning novel itself

Circular forms, Sun, Moon by Robert Delaunay

Anuk Arudpragasam on John Berger's G.

Anuk Arudpragasam, author of the 2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted A Passage North, on why he thinks John Berger’s 1972 Booker Prize-winning novel G. is ‘hugely impressive’.

John Berger

John Berger was born in London and educated at St Edward's School, Oxford. In 1962, he left Britain permanently, to live in a small village in the French Alps
British Guyana 1958

The Booker brothers and enslavement

When the Booker Prize was first conceived, in 1968, its founders Tom Maschler and Graham C Greene found a backer in Booker McConnell, a wholesale food distributor with a long-term presence in Guyana
John Berger, 1972

The Booker Prize 1972

Proof of the prize’s new high profile came when John Berger used his platform as winner to make things political and donated half his prize money to the British Black Panther movement