DAYSPRING, a memoir, edited and with a foreword by J. M. Coetzee

271pp., illus., paperback, Cape Town, 2024

Afterword by Dominic Driver, Dax Driver and Tamlyn Driver. Includes an appendix of poems and photographs

Poet and novelist C. J. Driver, always known as Jonty, was born in Cape Town in 1939 and grew up in Kroonstad and Grahamstown. While at the University of Cape Town he was President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963-4.  He was detained by the security police and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Cape Town. On his release he left for England and for almost thirty years was prohibited from returning to South Africa. After reading for an M.Phil. at Trinity College, Oxford, he worked as a teacher and headmaster in Hong Kong and England. He died in 2023.

His books include the novels Elegy for a Revolutionary, A Messiah of the Last Days, Send War in Our Time, O Lord and Death of Fathers, the poetry collections So Far, selected poems 1960-2004, BEFORE and Still Further: New poems, 2000-2020, the biographies Patrick Duncan: South African and Pan-African and The Man with the Suitcase: The life, execution and rehabilitation of John Harris, liberal terrorist, and a memoir of his later life, Some Schools.