Do you know what I watch? Animal traces in John Berger's work

Yves Berger and Katya Berger Andreadakis are coming to Blake Studio on Saturday 24 October, as part of the John Berger Centenary marking the 100th birthday of the writer and artist (1926–2017). The evening is called Do you know what I watch?, and it's a choral reading devised by Katya Berger Andreadakis. Rather than a straight reading, it follows the animals that crop up throughout Berger's work—mushrooms and eels, insects, hounds and clouds—and his lifelong reflection on the relationship between people and nature.

There's a family connection here that gives the night its weight. Katya is John Berger's daughter; she's translated several of his books into French and coauthored dialogues with him on Titian and Mantegna. She recently retired from a career as a film critic, editor of a women's magazine and a theatre critic in Geneva. Yves is John's son, a painter living and working in a small mountain village in the French Alps, who grew up among the peasant community and the artists who visited his father. Together they'll be reading their father's words aloud.

The evening is part of a wider series of literary events linked to John Berger: A Life of Drawing at Mandell's Gallery, which is the only UK exhibition of his visual work in his centenary year. If you've been following that, this is one of the companion pieces that sits alongside it.

It runs from 6:30pm to 8:00pm, with doors opening at 6:00pm. Tickets are £7 for members and £10 for non-members, both plus a booking fee, and free for students. You'll find it at Blake Studio, Norwich School, The Close, NR1 4DD.