Jeremy Patrick Cronin (born 12 September 1949) is a South African writer, author, and noted poet.
[2] Cronin was brought up in a White middle-class Roman Catholic family in Rondebosch in Cape Town, South Africa.
Cronin's work in the propaganda unit of the SACP brought him to the attention of the South African Bureau of State Security; he was arrested on charges under the Terrorism and Internal Security Acts and tried in the Cape Town Supreme Court in September 1976, along with David Rabkin and his wife Sue.
[3] The charges included conspiring with members of the African National Congress (also a banned organisation) and the SACP, and preparing and distributing pamphlets on these organisations' behalf (activities commemorated in Cronin's poem "A Step Away from Them," modelled on a poem of the same title by American poet Frank O'Hara).
His interviews with Helena Sheehan[6] in 2001 and 2002 met with a storm of controversy, because of his left critique of the ANC during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki.