Jack Cope

Robert Knox ″Jack″ Cope (3 June 1913 – 1 May 1991) was a South African novelist, short story writer, poet and editor.

Jack Cope was born in Natal, South Africa and home-schooled by tutors. From the age of 12, he boarded at Durban High School in Durban, afterwards becoming a journalist on Natal Mercury and then a political correspondent in London for South African newspapers. At the outbreak of the Second World War, in a state of some disillusionment, he returned to South Africa. He moved to Cape Town, where he worked for the left-wing Guardian newspaper from 1941 to 1955, in various capacities including cultural critic and, at one stage, general editor.

He married his second cousin, the artist Lesley De Villiers in 1942. They separated in 1958 and were divorced in the early 1960s. They had two sons, Raymond, (1948–1977) and Michael (born 1952).

Jack Cope is also well known for his romantic attachment (ca. 1960-1964) to South African poet Ingrid Jonker.

Cope published eight novels, more than a hundred short stories, and three collections of poetry, the last one in association with C.J. Driver. For twenty years, beginning in 1960, he edited Contrast, a literary magazine bilingual in English and Afrikaans. He co-edited The Penguin Book of South African Verse (1968) with Uys Krige and, as general editor throughout much of the 1970s, produced the Mantis editions of Southern African poets. In 1980 he moved to England, where he published The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans (1982) and his Selected Stories (1986).

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