Karavan Press and uHlanga are proud to announce the release of Dayspring, a memoir by the renowned South African-English poet and novelist C. J. Driver, edited and with a foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author J. M. Coetzee. The book releases on 1 July 2024 in South Africa.
Dayspring is a recollection of Driver’s South African youth – his childhood as a reverend’s son in Kroonstad and Grahamstown-Makhanda preceding his extraordinary student years at the University of Cape Town, during which he edited the student newspaper Varsity and became enmeshed in radical student politics.
As president of the anti-apartheid National Union of South African Students, Driver was detained by the security police, tortured and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Cape Town. Even after fleeing to England, Driver remained a bête-noire for the apartheid authorities, with ex-president B. J. Vorster keeping personal notes on Driver’s activities.
But all that comes later in his life. Dayspring is a tender and deeply personal book, offering an intimate picture of a family coming to terms with the losses of the Second World War. It is the story of a father and son recognising their differing beliefs, and of a young man navigating the joys and pitfalls of romance. As a direct descendant of the 1820 Settlers, Driver examines the contradictory beliefs and institutions of the South Africa he grew up in – particularly its boarding schools – with unique insight and humour.
Throughout the reader discovers the moments of inspiration, failure and literary exchange that were crucial to the development of Driver’s fiction, celebrated internationally during his lifetime, as well as his poetry, which, even before his death in 2023, has been lauded as one of the most significant bodies of work by a modern South African poet.
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. This is an extraordinary book.
- Publishers: Karavan Press and uHlanga
- ISBN: 978-1-7764726-3-5
- Releases 1 July 2024 in South Africa ONLY
- Foreword by J. M. Coetzee; afterword by Dominic Driver, Dax Driver and Tamlyn Driver
- Includes an appendix of poems and photographs
karavanpress.com 