John Peter Berger was an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a college text.

Later he was self exiled to continental Europe, living between the french Alps in summer and the suburbs of Paris in winter. Since then, his production has increased considerably, including a variety of genres, from novel to social essay, or poetry. One of the most common themes that appears on his books is the dialectics established between modernity and memory and loss,

Another of his most remarkable works has been the trilogy titled Into Their Labours, that includes the books Pig Earth (1979), Once In Europa (1983) Lilac And Flag (1990). With those books, Berger makes a meditation about the way of the peasant, that changes one poverty for another in the city. This theme is also observed in his novel King, but there he focuses more in the rural diaspora and the bitter side of the urban way of life.

The screenplay for the 1976 Best Screenplay winner from the National Society of Film Critics. As a metaphor for the changing political climate in Europe in the late 60's, "Jonah..." is a story of a former political activist and his contemporaries learning to live with the materialism of their age. Max's involvement with a real estate deal, as well as Madeline's interest in Hinduism--in order to expand her sexual horizons--are a clear indication of the shift in modern thinking--from the idealistic to the practical.

The cinema of Alain Tanner has always made room for society’s dropouts and dreamers, and nowhere more so than in his most celebrated work (coauthored by John Berger), which tracks a ragtag group of Swiss strangers, brought together by chance and a shared anticapitalist spirit, and the little refuge they create for themselves in the face of political and economic failures. A bracing reminder that change indeed begins at home, over dinners and conversation, Jonah “strikes a mature balance between being realistic about the world and thinking that another world is possible,” notes Vogue’s John Powers. “Seeing it today . . . its undefeated sanity is bracing.”174