C.J. ("Jonty") Driver was born in Cape Town and spent his youth in various provinces of South Africa, later teaching in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia), and at Cape Town Unviersity. He was elected President of the National Union of South African Students in 1963, but in 1964 was detained in solitary confinement on suspicion of involvement in the African Resistance Movement. On his release he moved to England, holding posts as teacher, headmaster and research fellow at various academic institutions there and in Hong Kong.
He has published six collections of poems, 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 (1980). His latest work is So Far: Selected Poems 1960-2004.
He recently became an honorary senior lecturer in the School of Literature and Creative Writing of the UEA, and was awarded a Bogliasco Fellowship to pursue his writing at the Liguria Study Centre in Italy. He was one of the judges of the 2007 Caine Prize for African Writing.
He lives in East Sussex.

More information: C J Driver's official web site