A New Statesman Book of the Year 2024

When renowned poet C. J. Driver passed away in 2023, he left behind a memoir of his youth in South Africa, and the years leading up to his detention and torture by the apartheid security police, after which he fled the country.

Edited and with a foreword by his lifelong friend, J. M. Coetzee, Dayspring details the formation of a young man who would become an exiled activist, a highly respected British schoolmaster, and a notable modern poet. Tender, enlightening, and sometimes alarming, Dayspring offers intimate pictures of a family coming to terms with the losses of the Second World War, of uneasy schooldays, and of radical student politics in the 1960s.

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.