A Fortunate Man: John Berger in Hackney - Wenlock Barn

John Berger (1926 – 2017) was one of Europe’s most important post-war writers and intellectuals, admired across the world. Storyteller (his own vocational preference), Booker Prize -winning novelist, filmmaker, essayist, poet and artist, he also co-created one of British television’s genuine masterpieces, ‘Ways of Seeing’, first screened in 1972, and directed by Mike Dibb. It is often forgotten that he was born in Filey Road, Stoke Newington, to Miriam and Stanley Berger. John’s father, Stanley, was a secular Jew who converted to Catholicism, was awarded a Military Cross in the First World War and subsequently an MBE. The young Berger was sent to a private school in Oxford, joined the army in 1944 – 1946 then attended Chelsea School of Art, intending to become a painter, but a much richer creative life followed in many artistic forms. In the early 1970s he met Glenn Thompson, the black American draft-resister who founded the Centerprise Bookshop project in Hackney, and in 1974, learning from the publishing experience at Centerprise, they set up the Writers & Readers’ Publishing Co-operative. For this event, Stoke Newington-based writer & social historian Ken Worpole will be in discussion with writer and curator Gareth Evans, a close friend / publisher of Berger, and organiser of an international festival on Berger’s work in 2005. Together they will be exploring John Berger’s formative years in Hackney and London’s left-wing bohemian culture.