DayspringBy: C.J. Driver

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.