Jonny Steinberg
Steinberg (2014)
Steinberg (2014)
Born (1970-03-22) 22 March 1970
South Africa
EducationWits University
Alma materUniversity of Oxford
Notable worksWinnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (2023)
Notable awardsWindham–Campbell Literature Prize;
Sunday Times Alan Paton Award;
Media24 Books Literary Prize: Recht Malan Prize for Nonfiction

Jonny Steinberg (born 22 March 1970) is a South African writer and scholar. He is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa's transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, and The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, won the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. In 2013, Steinberg was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.

Biography

Steinberg was born and raised in South Africa. He was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and earned a doctorate in political theory. He has worked as a journalist at a South African national daily newspaper, written scripts for television drama, and has been a consultant to the South African government on criminal justice policy.[1]

In 2015 Steinberg made a widely publicised announcement that he was moving back to South Africa for a number of reasons including "to stand outside myself and watch my bourgeois life prodded and pushed and buffeted around by lives quite unlike my own".[2] It was reported that he would take-up a professorship at the University of the Witwatersrand.[3] However, he subsequently changed his mind and remained in Oxford.

Until 2020, he was Professor of African Studies at Oxford University. He currently lectures part-time at the Council on African Studies at Yale University.

Books

Steinberg's first two books Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer,[4] and The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, won South Africa's premier non-fiction award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award.[5]

His books also include Three-Letter Plague (published as Sizwe's Test in the United States), which chronicles a young man's journey through South Africa's AIDS pandemic.[6] It was a Washington Post Book of the Year [7] and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize.[8] Steinberg is also the author of Thin Blue (2008), an exploration of the unwritten rules of engagement between South African civilians and police,[9][10] and Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York (2011), about the Liberian civil war and its aftermath in an exile community in New York and described as an "extraordinary, stylistically varied mix of reportage, history and biography".[11]

Steinberg's 2015 book, A Man of Good Hope, was described by Observer reviewer Ian Birrell, who wrote: "On the surface, it is simply the biography of a lonely young migrant who dreams of a decent life, hardening his shell and hustling to survive in hostile human environments. Yet it is really an epic African saga that chronicles some fundamental modern issues such as crime, human trafficking, migration, poverty and xenophobia, while giving glimpses into the Somali clan system, repression in Ethiopia and lethal racism in townships."[12] The book was adapted into a stage production by Mark Dornford-May.[13]

Steinberg's dual biography of Winnie Madikizela and Nelson Mandela, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, was published in May 2023. The book is, as Richard Stengel wrote, "a beautiful and immensely sad book. [...] [Steinberg] gently but firmly removes the masks they each carefully constructed, only to find other masks underneath."[14]

Awards and honours

Bibliography

  • Midlands. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2002. xii, 259 pages. ISBN 1-86842-124-4
  • The Number: One Man's Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2004. 427 pages. ISBN 1-86842-205-4
  • "Nongoloza's Children: Western Cape Prison Gangs During and After Apartheid", Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, 2004
  • Notes from a Fractured Country. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2007
  • Sizwe's Test. New York: Simon and Schuster, February 2008. Hardcover, 368 pages. ISBN 1-4165-5269-3; ISBN 978-1-4165-5269-7
  • Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, August 2008.
  • Three-Letter Plague. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, March 2008; Vintage Random House, December 2008
  • Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York. London: Jonathan Cape Random House, January 2011; Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, March 2011
  • A Man of Good Hope. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015; ISBN 978-0224094122. New York: Knopf, 2015; ISBN 978-0385352727
  • One Day in Bethlehem. London: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2019; ISBN 9781868429349.
  • Winnie & Nelson. Portrait of a Marriage. London, William Collins, 2023. ISBN 9780008353797

References

  1. ↑ Author page, Simon & Schuster.
  2. ↑ Steinberg, Jonny (18 February 2015). "Why I'm Moving Back To South Africa". Archived from the original on 18 March 2022.
  3. ↑ "Jonny Steinberg on Why He Has Come Home to South Africa: "I am Defined By the Eyes That See Me on the Street"". BooksLive. 19 February 2015. Archived from the original on 12 August 2015.
  4. ↑ Burbridge, Matthew (4 October 2002), "Anatomy of a murder", Mail & Guardian.
  5. ↑ "Previous winners of the Alan Paton Award and the Sunday Times Fiction Prize". The Times. 4 June 2007. Archived from the original on 26 February 2009. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  6. ↑ Pisani, Elizabeth (18 January 2009). "Review: Three Letter Plague by Jonny Steinberg". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  7. ↑ "Best Books of 2008". Washington Post. 8 December 2008. Archived from the original on 17 February 2011. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  8. ↑ "2009 | Wellcome Book Prize". wellcomebookprize. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  9. ↑ Bosworth, Mary; Hoyle, Carolyn (2012). What is Criminology?. OUP Oxford. pp. 130–131. ISBN 9780191635410.
  10. ↑ Johnston, Les; Shearing, Clifford (2013). Innovative Possibilities: Global Policing Research and Practice. Routledge. pp. 111–117. ISBN 9781317981831.
  11. ↑ Busby, Margaret (12 March 2011), "Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City by Jonny Steinberg – review", The Guardian.
  12. ↑ Birrell, Ian (4 January 2015)"A Man of Good Hope review – a refugee's tale", The Observer.
  13. ↑ Jones, Chris. "'A Man of Good Hope' is the long, hard story of a Somalian refugee. There's hope at least in the singing". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved 25 October 2019.
  14. ↑ The Guardian, 14 May 2023
  15. ↑ Baker, Dorie (4 March 2013). "Yale awards $1.35 million to nine writers". YaleNews. Retrieved 5 March 2013.
  16. ↑ "2020 Media24 Books Literary Prize: Recht Malan Prize for Nonfiction". LitNet. 18 June 2020. Retrieved 19 June 2020.
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