Biography

Born in Cape Town in 1939, C.J. (‘Jonty’) Driver spent the years of the Second World War in Kroonstad with his mother and younger brother. His father fought through North Africa, then was captured at Tobruk and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in Italy and Germany. When he came back, the family moved to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, where his father was chaplain of St Andrew’s College, to which Jonty Driver went as a pupil in due course.

After five years at the University of Cape Town, he was elected President of the National Union of South African Students in 1963 and again in 1964. In August and September 1964, he was locked up by the police in solitary confinement, ostensibly on suspicion of his involvement in the African Resistance Movement, and immediately afterwards left for England.

He went to Trinity College, Oxford, to read for an M.Phil, and afterwards taught at Sevenoaks School and then at Matthew Humberstone Comprehensive School in South Humberside.

While he was at Oxford, the South African authorities refused to renew his passport and he became stateless for several years, eventually becoming a British citizen. For more than twenty years he was prohibited from returning to South Africa.

In 1976 he was a Research Fellow at the University of York, and for twenty-three years he was a headmaster (Principal, Island School, Hong Kong, 1978-83; Headmaster, Berkhamsted School, 1983-9; Master, Wellington College, 1989-2000). He is now a full-time writer, though he continues his involvement in education.

He has been an honorary senior lecturer at the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia, since 2007. He was a judge for the Caine Prize for African Writing, 2007 and 2008. He was a Bogliasco Fellow in 2007. He was a Fellow at the Macdowell Colony in New Hampshire, USA, in the Fall of 2009, and a Fellow at the Hawthornden Writers' Retreat in March/April 2011.

He is married with three children and eight grandchildren, and he and his wife live in East Sussex, though they travel widely and often visit South Africa.

C.J. ('Jonty') Driver

C.J. ('Jonty') Driver has published six collections of poems (the first shared with Jack Cope), five novels (the first, Elegy for a Revolutionary, in 1968, and the latest, Shades of Darkness, in 2004) and a biography, Patrick Duncan, South African and Pan-African (published first in 1980, immediately banned in South Africa - like his first two novels - but re-issued in 2000).

His first four novels have recently been reissued by Faber & Faber under the imprint Faber Finds.

Fellow South Africans John Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer have both paid tribute to these early novels.

His latest publication is the Selected Poems 1960-2004, under the title So Far. He contributes to periodicals such as The Yale Review, The Times Literary Supplement and Slightly Foxed, the 'quarterly for real readers'. His poem 'And So On' was introduced in the TLS in November 2009.

In June 2010 he attended the "Worlds 2010" literary conference organised by the Writers' Centre of Norwich at the University of East Anglia, and was one of the four readers (with J.M.Coetzee, Zoe Wicomb and Gabeba Baderoon) at an evening of South African readings at the Norwich Playhouse.

The Winter 2010 issue of the magazine for the Friends of Westonbirt Arboretum featured his 96-line poem, 'A Winter's Day at Westonbirt'.

C.J.Driver had two poems in The Manchester Review for November 2010 (No 5). He was invited to read poems and talk about his early novels at the Franschoek Literary Festival in South Africa in May 2011.