Charles Jonathan Driver was born in Cape Town in 1939 but spent the years of the Second World War in Kroonstad and Cradock with his mother and younger brother and his grandfather, who was the rector of the Anglican parish there.
When he came back to South Africa, the family moved to Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape, where his father was appointed chaplain at St. Andrew's College and where Jonty later did his schooling.
In August and September 1964, he was detained without trial by the police and held in solitary confinement, possibly because of his suspected involvement in the African Resistance Movement, on his release he immediately left for England.
[2] While he was at Oxford, the South African authorities refused to renew his passport and he became stateless for several years, eventually becoming a British citizen.
Driver was as of November 2019[update] an honorary senior lecturer at the School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia,[7] a post he held since 2007.