Jeremy Cronin

Background

Jeremy Cronin was born on September 12, 1949. Born into a middle-class English-speaking family in South Africa, Cronin grew up relatively insulated from the troubles of South African apartheid, which separated black and white in society. As a youth, he read primarily European and North American poetry and began writing his own poems when he was around fifteen years old.

Education

Jeremy Cronin attended the University of Cape Town and studied at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, where he received a Master of Arts.

Career

After entering university in 1968, Jeremy Cronin became involved in antiapartheid political activism. He told journalist Helena Sheehan in an interview on the Dublin City University Web site that the assassination of the South African intellectual Rick Turner “really marked my entry into political intellectual activity and, quite quickly after that, organizational political activity as well.''

In 1976 Cronin was arrested by South African security police for his participation in the then-outlawed African National Congress. He was sentenced to seven years in the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. In the second year of his sentence, his wife died. “It was in prison that my first seriously sustained compulsive effort at writing poetry took place,'' Cronin told Barbara Harlow in an interview in Alif He also told Sheehan that he began writing poetry “as a survival activity in prison without much sense of an audience."

The result of Cronin's writing efforts in prison was his first book of poetry. Inside, which was published in 1984, the year after his release. “Inside. These poems illegally recorded in prison and either smuggled out or memorized for later reworking, bears testimony in its strongest constituents to a surprising symbiosis of autobiography, lyricism, narrative, oral performance, and political commitment," noted a contributor to Contemporary Poets. The title of the volume clearly refers to Cronin's incarceration, but, as noted by the Contemporary Poets contributor, it also “refers to the autobiographical interiority of love poems written for the wife who died." Writing in Research in African Literatures, Rita Barnard noted that this “first collection emphasizes from the start the location of writing." She went on to comment that Cronin has often stated that prison gave him a sense of place from which he could speak, and wrote, “To claim prison as a privileged 'speaking place' is not to minimize the pain, frustration, and terror of incarceration - experiences which Cronin's poems movingly testify. They record also an acute sense of spatial disorientation, which the poet attributes to the paucity of visual stimuli in the gray, enclosed world 'inside.'"

In 2009 Jeremy Cronin was appointed a Deputy Minister of Transport by President Jacob Zuma. Later in 2012, he became Deputy Minister of Public Works. Cronin retired from government post in 2019.

Achievements

• Jeremy Cronin is a well-known South African author. His poetry gained international recognition through the publication of his three volumes of poems.

Works

More photos

• book

  • More than a Casual Contact

    (Since the publication of his debut volume, Inside, which ...)

    2006
  • Inside & out: Poems from inside and even the dead

    (This collection tracks across the political and emotional...)

    1999
  • Even the Dead 1997
  • Ideologies of Politics 1975
  • Inside 1984

Politics

Jeremy Cronin is a member of the South African Communist Party. He is also a member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress.

Membership

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  Jeremy Cronin worked in cooperation with the United Democratic Front.

  United Democratic Front , South Africa

Connections

Jeremy Cronin was married to Anne Marie until her death.

Wife:

Anne Marie Cronin

Anne Marie Cronin died of a brain tumor.

References

• Contemporary Authors vol. 233