Canongate lands Berger's collected work on the miners' strikes

Canongate has acquired and will posthumously publish a "succinct and urgent" collection of John Berger’s writing on mine workers and miners’ strikes, The Underground Sea.

Simon Thorogood acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Agencia Balcells and the Wylie Agency. Canongate will publish in hardback, e-book and audiobook in January 2024, with a paperback to follow.

The collection will be edited by archivist and biographer Tom Overton and curator Matthew Harle. Berger is the author of Ways of Seeing (Penguin Classics) and many other books, including the Booker Prize-winning novel G (Bloomsbury/ Penguin Books). He died, aged 90, in January 2017.

The synopsis for the new book says: "The collection includes new transcripts and image-essays of his rarely seen BBC programme "Germinal"; a new transcript of a moving interview made in 1963 and his essay ‘Miners’. Berger’s ’Germinal’ places itself in the heart of a Derbyshire mining village, with reflections on the everyday life of a typical pit community. 

"Berger grapples with the politics of witness as he studies the miners’ labour and the wider community shaped in service to this work. Reflecting on their precarity, he goes back to Zola’s text for hope that ‘a new world is germinating underneath the ground. And when it arrives, it will crack open the earth.’"

Overton said: "The anniversary of the 1984 strike is a moment not just to think about the lost worlds of British coal mining, but their connection to global climate catastrophe. The works collected together in The Underground Sea are a model of how to draw hope from the echoes and repetitions of history."

Harle said: "Berger’s ’Germinal’ was filmed in 1972 and broadcast just three times — its last airing a month after the Battle of Orgreave. Transforming the film into a narrated visual essay slows down an ephemeral work of broadcast into a political meditation that entwines the everyday life of a Derbyshire mining community within a historic chain of strike action from Zola to our present."

Thorogood said: "We will publish to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1984-85 strike, and the book comes as a timely reminder both of the power of John Berger’s prose and of the power and possibilities of collective action."