Jonny Steinberg

Jonny Steinberg (born 22 March 1970) is a South African writer and scholar.

Biography Steinberg was born and raised in the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, 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 taught for nine years at Oxford, where he was Professor of African Studies. He currently teaches at Yale University's Council on African Studies.

Books Three of Steinberg's books – Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white South African farmer, The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, and Winnie & Nelson (2023) – won South Africa's premier non-fiction prize, the Sunday Times CNA Literary Awards making him the first writer to win it three times. In 2013, Steinberg was an inaugural winner of the Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes., and in 2024 was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

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. It was a Washington Post Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Steinberg is also the author of Thin Blue (2008), an exploration of the unwritten rules of engagement between South African civilians and police, 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. Writing in The Guardian, Margaret Busby described it as an "extraordinary, stylistically varied mix of reportage, history and biography".

Steinberg's 2015 book, A Man of Good Hope, was described by Observer reviewer Ian Birrell as "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". The book was adapted into a stage production by the Isango Ensemble and premiered at the Young Vic in London in 2016.

Steinberg's dual biography of Winnie Madikizela and Nelson Mandela, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage, was published in May 2023. Damon Galgut described it as "a devastating study of modern South Africa", while Hlonipha Mokoena named it "a masterful book that rattles your bones". Richard Stengel, ghostwriter of Nelson Mandela's autobiography, called it "a beautiful and immensely sad book. [...] [Steinberg] gently but firmly removes the masks [Winnie and Nelson] each carefully constructed, only to find other masks underneath." J. M. Coetzee described the book "as deeply sympathetic to Winnie, caught up in the whirlwind of insurrectionary violence, as to Nelson, trapped in his prison cell and losing touch day by day with the evolving situation on the ground". It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and the Sunday Times Non-fiction Award, making Steinberg the first author to win the prize three times. It was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography as well as for the Wolfson History Prize. This dual biography was also a Washington Post, New Yorker, Guardian, Times of London, Times Literary Supplement, Spectator and Waterstones Book of the Year.

Awards and honours 2003: Recht Malan Prize, shortlist, Midlands 2003: South African Booksellers' Choice Award, Midlands 2003: Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, Midlands 2009: Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, shortlist, Three-Letter Plague 2009: Wellcome Trust Book Prize, shortlist, Three-Letter Plague 2013: Windham–Campbell Literature Prize 2015: Johannesburg Book Prize, shortlist, A Man of Good Hope 2015: Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, shortlist, A Man of Good Hope 2020: Recht Malan Prize, One Day in Bethlehem 2023: Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, shortlist, Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage 2024: Sunday Times Non-fiction Award, Winnie & Nelson