John Berger: From Life – with Tom Overton and Gareth Evans

This event, originally titled 'John Berger: From Life', took place on 3 September 2026. The information below is correct as of the publication date.

In 2009 John Berger gave his archive to 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.

Tom Overton got to know Berger as he catalogued this archive, and exchanges between them were a journey of discovery and rediscovery. Now, in an extraordinary new book, Overton draws on this experience and a vast and previously unseen trove of material to explore John Berger's life and work one hundred years after his birth.

There were so many different subjects to Berger’s work; so many precisely chosen forms. He reimagined the relationship between art and technology; charted the disappearance of peasants 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 was passionately committed to the Palestinian cause.

In a special event to launch his new book, John Berger: From Life, Tom Overton talked to Gareth Evans about the continued importance of a figure who always focused on the creating and recreating of communities past and present. At the centre of this book, above all, is the idea that John Berger wants our company, and we need his.

A photographic display drawn from the John Berger Archive at the British Library is running in the main Entrance Hall Gallery from 28 August 2026 until 5 February 2027.

Thumbnail credit: John Berger in London, 1966. Photograph by Libby Hall.

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Speaker Bios:

Tom Overton is a writer and curator. After cataloguing John Berger’s archive at the British Library, Overton spent 15 years following its traces from Moscow to Texas, from the Alps to Istanbul. He worked with Berger on editing Portraits: John Berger on Artists and Landscapes: John Berger on Art, with Matthew Harle on The Underground Sea: John Berger on Miners and the Miners’ Strike, and with Katya Berger on a forthcoming edition of Berger’s letters. He has written for The Guardian, New Statesman, frieze, and London Review of Books and Paris Review blogs, works as the Archive Curator of the Barbican Centre, and lives in Sheffield.

Gareth Evans is a writer, editor, curator, event producer and host. He hosts the LRB Screen Series at The Garden Cinema.

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