Jonny Steinberg

Who is Jonny Steinberg?

Jonny Steinberg 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, about the murder of a white South African farmer, and The Number, a biography of a prison gangster, won South Africa’s premier non-fiction award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Steinberg’s books also include Three-Letter Plague, 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, among others. Steinberg is also the author of Thin Blue, an exploration of the unwritten rules of engagement between South African civilians and police, and Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, about the Liberian civil war and its aftermath in an exile community in New York.

Steinberg has a doctorate in political theory from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is currently a lecturer in African Studies at the University of Oxford.