DAYSPRING: A MEMOIR
C. J. Driver

Edited and with a foreword by J. M. Coetzee

July 2024
270pp
230mm x 150mm
ISBN: 978-1-7764726-3-5

I didn’t win the prize. I remember feeling merely puzzled, not resentful: what I had done was so clearly much ... no, not better, but more serious. It mattered. It wasn’t a joke.

When renowned South African author C. J. Driver passed away in 2023, he left behind a memoir of his first twenty-five years; a portrait of the artist as a young man.

Edited by his lifelong friend, J. M. Coetzee, Dayspring recalls the formative years of someone who became an exiled activist, a highly respected schoolmaster, and one of South Africa’s major modern poets.

Tender, enlightening, and sometimes alarming, Dayspring is a deeply personal recollection of historically turbulent times. It offers intimate pictures of a family coming to terms with the losses of the Second World War, of uneasy schooldays in Grahamstown, and of radical student politics in the early 1960s. As an adult, Driver’s beliefs put him squarely at odds with apartheid society; his detention in solitary confinement and subsequent flight from his home country were only the beginning of the consequences he would have to face.

Moments of inspiration intersperse with a reckoning with injustice: in Dayspring, we are witness to the formation of a sensitive, incisive intellect; someone who did not simply engage with the world through literature, but faced up to it, too.

C. J. Driver, always known as Jonty, was born in Cape Town in 1939. He was the author of ten collections of poetry, five novels, and numerous works of non-fiction. (His last book with uHlanga was Still Further: New Poems, 2000–2020.)

President of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students in 1963–4, Jonty was detained in solitary confinement by the security police, subsequently fleeing to England. He became stateless and his writings were banned. His professional life was spent as a schoolmaster in Hong Kong and England.

Jonty died in England in 2023. Since then he has been hailed as one of South Africa’s major modern poets.

J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 and studied at the University of Cape Town from 1957 to 1961. Between 1972 and 2000 he held a series of positions on the staff at UCT. His writings have won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. He currently lives in Adelaide, South Australia.