Booker prize-winning author John Berger dies aged 90

The Booker prize-winning author and art critic John Berger has died at the age of 90.

The Marxist intellectual, whose pioneering 1972 book and subsequent BBC series, Ways of Seeing, brought a political perspective to art criticism, died at his home in the Paris suburb of Antony on Monday. He had been ill for about a year.

He won the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G, and pledged to give half the prize money to the revolutionary American group the Black Panthers.

Berger was the author of art criticism, novels, poetry, screenplays and many other books. He consistently challenged traditional interpretations of art and society and connections between the two.

The author Ali Smith described Berger last year in an appreciation as "one of the world`s most vital corresponders".

"In John Berger’s work love and art and political and historical understanding are always in layered combination," she said.

"There are many other writers and artists who work with this relation, but none with quite the transformatory fusion of his combining, which is a bit like encountering what clarity really is, what the word means, like looking through pure water and seeing things naturally magnified."

Source: Telegraph