Jonny Steinberg

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

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 at Oxford for nine years where he was Professor of African Studies.

He currently teaches at Yale University’s Council on African Studies.

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

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".

In 2013 he was an inaugural winner of the Windham-Campbell Literary Prizes.

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'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."

JM Coetzee described it "as deeply sympathetic to Winnie, caught up in the whirlwind of insurrectionary violence, as to Nelson, trapping in his prison cell and losing touch day by day with the evolving situation on the ground".

It has been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography and was a Washington Post, New Yorker, Guardian, Times of London, Times Literary Supplement, Spectator and Waterstones Book of the Year.