John Berger and Me by Nikos Papastergiadis shortlisted for 2025 National Biography Award

Nikos Papastergiadis’s debut literary non-fiction work John Berger and Me has been shortlisted for the 2025 National Biography Award. The announcement was made on 9 July.

Read the judges’ comments below.

The substance of John Berger and Me is implicit in its title. In an original hybrid form, Nikos Papastergiadis recounts the regular visits he made in the 1990s to John Berger’s home in the French village of Quincy. This unusual friendship began when the author was a doctoral student at Cambridge, writing his dissertation on Berger, the English cultural theorist, artist and novelist, whose still-relevant Ways of Seeing (1972) transformed the art world.

Nikos Papastergiadis, the son of immigrants from a Greek peasant village, offers a warm tribute to his mentor in John Berger and Me. He describes his book in painterly terms as a ‘likeness’, which takes the form of ‘a sequence of anecdotes … fragments’. The gifted storyteller explores the two men’s shared love of motorbikes, rembetika and the grind and sweat of hay-making, and creates vivid portraits of Berger’s family, the villagers and the author’s own parents. The broader conversation covers migration and belonging as well as the existential problems facing an agrarian peasantry in the modern world.

Nikos Papastergiadis studied at the University of Melbourne and University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. Learn more here.