---
title: "John Berger at 100: How He Used His 1972 Booker Prize Speech to Name the Caribbean Sugar Fortune Behind the Money and Gave Half of It to the Black Panthers"
description: John Berger, born 5th November 1926, won the 1972 Booker for G. and gave half the £5,000 to the British Black Panthers. Here is why, and where it went.
author: Dr Marina Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-11-01T08:40:20.088Z
updated: 2026-11-01T08:45:37.347Z
canonical: https://thequantumoflight.com/article/john-berger-at-100-booker-prize-speech
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/pexels-36181920.webp
categories: Literary Culture
content_type: Feature
publication: The Quantum of Light
schema_type: Article
about:
  - type: Person
    name: John Berger
    description: John Berger (1926 to 2017) was a British novelist, essayist, art critic and painter, born in Stoke Newington, London, on 5th November 1926. He wrote and presented the 1972 BBC series and book Ways of Seeing, and his novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize. He gave half the prize money to the British Black Panthers and used the other half to write A Seventh Man, his book with the photographer Jean Mohr on migrant workers in Europe. From 1973 he lived in Quincy, a farming village in the Haute-Savoie, where he wrote the trilogy Into Their Labours. He died near Paris on 2nd January 2017, aged 90.
    url: https://www.johnbergerhome.com
    jobTitle: Novelist, essayist, art critic and painter
    sameAs:
      - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Berger
      - https://www.johnbergerhome.com
---

### Book: G.
By John Berger

John Berger's novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize. Its hero, G., is the illegitimate son of an Italian merchant and a wealthy American woman, raised on an English farm at the end of the nineteenth century. He moves through a Europe heading towards the First World War, from the Milan uprising of 1898 to the first flight across the Alps, seducing women as he goes. Berger mixes historical fiction and a coming-of-age story with essays, poems and drawings to write about desire, love and solidarity. This centenary edition from NYRB Classics has a new introduction by Ben Lerner.

[Penguin Random House](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/808920/g-by-john-berger/)

On Thursday 23rd November 1972, John Berger stood up at a dinner in the Café Royal on Regent Street in London with a prepared statement in his hand. He had just won the Booker Prize, then in its fourth year and worth £5,000, for his novel *G.* Within a few minutes he had told the room that the money came from a company grown rich on Caribbean sugar, and that half of it was going to the London-based Black Panther Movement.

Berger was born in Stoke Newington, London, on 5th November 1926, and he would have turned 100 this Thursday. His centenary has filled the year with exhibitions, film seasons and new editions across Europe, and it lands four days before [the 2026 Booker winner is named at Old Billingsgate](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/booker-prize-2026-shortlist) on 9th November, for a prize now worth £50,000. In more than half a century of Booker nights, his is the one writers still bring up.

## Berger opened by comparing shortlisted writers to racehorses

The speech began as an attack on the prize itself. Berger told the guests he found the competitiveness of literary prizes distasteful, and he described the publicised suspense of the shortlist as treating writers like horses at a race meeting. He then thanked that year's jury for choosing four books of real imaginative independence, and said the win pleased him as a response from fellow writers.

He spent the next part of the speech on money. *G.* had taken five years to write, and he had already planned the next five years of his life around a book on the migrant workers of Europe: eleven million people doing the dirtiest and worst paid work in the industrial cities, and some forty million family members left behind in towns and villages. He wanted to travel with Turkish, Portuguese and Greek friends as interpreters and to work again with the Swiss photographer Jean Mohr, his partner on *A Fortunate Man*, their 1967 book about a country doctor. He put the cost at about £10,000 over four years, and he had none of it.

## He traced the £5,000 back to Guyana's sugar estates

Booker McConnell, the company behind the prize, had traded in the Caribbean for more than 130 years, and Berger named Guyana as the seat of its wealth. He told the dinner that the region's modern poverty came directly from that trade, and that the same poverty had pushed [hundreds of thousands of West Indians to Britain as migrant workers](https://thequantumoflight.com/article/black-history-month-2026-honouring-our-communities). A book about migrants, he pointed out, would be paid for out of profits made from migrants and their ancestors.

He went further, linking the slave trade to the money that financed the industrial revolution and modern Europe. In *G.*, set in the years before the First World War, the most important single image is the Monument of the Four Moors in Livorno, a statue of four chained African captives at the feet of a Medici duke. 'I have to turn this prize against itself,' Berger said. He insisted the gesture had nothing to do with guilt or charity, and that it concerned his development as a writer and his relationship with the culture that had formed him.

## The cheque for £2,500 helped buy a house in Finsbury Park

Berger chose the Black Panther Movement in London for its work against the exploitation of black workers and for its links, through its Black People's Information Centre, to campaigners in Guyana and Trinidad. The group needed money for its newspaper. He closed the speech with the line that people have quoted ever since: the half he gave away, he told the guests, would change the half he kept.

Historians of the British Black Power movement later traced what happened next. The cheque was handed over in the Albany pub on Great Portland Street, and the money went towards the mortgage on a house in Finsbury Park. The Booker's own account told a different story for four decades, claiming that Booker McConnell had left the Caribbean by 1972 and that the Panthers had already disbanded. The prize corrected its website only in 2012, for the fortieth anniversary of the win.

The other half did what Berger promised. *A Seventh Man*, his book with Jean Mohr on migrant workers in Europe, came out in 1975, and its mix of photographs, testimony and essay is still read as one of the most vivid accounts of that labour.

## Fifty years on, the Booker itself retold the story

In 2022 the Booker Prize Foundation commissioned a film, *Seeing G.*, in which the novelist Jo Hamya revisited the night, followed the money and looked again at the novel. This autumn Hamya has written the introduction to a new centenary edition of *G.*, one of three Berger reissues alongside *About Looking*, introduced by his biographer Tom Overton, and *Across a Frontier*, a selection of his work across genres chosen by Teju Cole.

The speech also marked a turn in Berger's own life. In 1973 he left London for Quincy, a small farming village in the Haute-Savoie, where he spent seventeen years writing *Into Their Labours*, his trilogy on the disappearance of European peasant life. He lived in France for the rest of his life and died at home outside Paris on 2nd January 2017, aged 90.

If you follow the Booker on 9th November, the winner will collect ten times what Berger did, in a ceremony he would have recognised. His speech runs to about a thousand words, and you can [read it in full on the Booker Prizes website](https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/i-have-to-turn-the-prize-against-itself-john-bergers-1972-booker-prize) in five minutes. His closing line still sits at the top of most tributes this month: in the end, he told the Café Royal, 'clarity is more important than money.'