The Curator Who Became the Biographer: Tom Overton's 'John Berger: From Life'
John Berger donated his literary archive to the British Library in 2009. The man he entrusted to catalogue it — Tom Overton — has now written the biography Berger asked him to wait a few years to produce. Verso Books publishes John Berger: From Life, a 384-page life of the critic, novelist and broadcaster, in September 2026. The Guardian reviewed it on 10 August 2026. (The Guardian)
Berger was a storyteller — that is how he described himself. Born in 1926 and raised in London as a child of the Blitz, he became one of the most influential art critics of the twentieth century. He rejected the "great man" theory of art history advanced by the broadcaster and historian Kenneth Clark. In 1972, Berger's novel G won the Booker Prize, the UK's leading literary award for a single work of fiction. That same year, his BBC television series Ways of Seeing took Clark's patrician model of art appreciation and turned it on its head, arguing that the way we look at images is shaped by who controls them and why.
Berger's first broadcasting job was with the BBC World Service, describing pictures in the National Gallery to listeners in West Africa. It was a fitting start for a critic who spent his career insisting that art belonged to everyone, not just to the initiated.
Overton came to Berger through the archive itself. He catalogued the British Library collection as part of a Collaborative Doctoral Award funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council — a scheme that places a doctoral researcher inside a cultural institution rather than a university department. (British Library events) Over the following 15 years, he followed the traces of Berger's life from Moscow to Texas, from the Alps to Istanbul. He also edited two volumes of Berger's writing about art, Portraits and Landscapes, published by Verso. (Verso Books)
What makes the biography distinctive is its method. The Guardian's review describes Overton's book as "unashamedly subjective": he refers to Berger as "John," uses direct address and shifts between tenses. It is the choice of someone who knew his subject, curated his papers, and was told by Berger himself to wait before writing — a cooling-off period that turns out to have lasted years rather than months.
Overton is now Archive Curator at the Barbican Centre in London and co-host of the radio programme Suite (212) on Resonance FM. (Frieze) The Verso edition carries ISBN 9781804298442. (Blackwell's)
For readers who know Berger only through Ways of Seeing, the book promises a life that moves well beyond the television studio — across continents, through archives, and into the company of a writer who never accepted that looking at art was a passive act.
