Jonny Steinberg

Jonny Steinberg is the author of several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. He is a two-time winner of the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award, and an inaugural winner of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes.

Until 2020, he was professor of African studies at Oxford University. He currently teaches part-time at the Council on African Studies at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and is visiting professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) in Johannesburg.

Author's books

A Man of Goodhope

A Man of Good Hope

A Man of Good Hope by Jonny Steinberg is the story of a person shorn of the things we have come to believe make us human – personal possessions, parents, siblings.

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Midlands

Midlands

Sifting through the betrayals and the poisoned memories of a century-long relationship between black and white, Steinberg takes us to a part of post-apartheid South Africa we fear to contemplate. Midlands is about the midlands of the heart and mind, the midlands between possession and dispossession, the midlands between the past and present, myth and reality. Midlands is a tour de force of investigative journalism.

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One Day in Bethlehem

A single moment can change a life forever… One Day in Bethlehem by Jonny Steinberg is the heart-stopping story of one man’s justice denied during the birth pains of democratic South Africa.

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The Number

The Number

On 9 June 2003, a 43-year-old coloured man named Magadien Wentzel walked out of Pollsmoor Prison in Cape Town. Behind him lay a lifelong career in the 28s, South Africa’s oldest and most reviled prison gang, for decades rumoured to have specialised in rape and robbery. Jonny Steinberg met Wentzel in prison in the dying months of 2002. By the time Wentzel was released, he and Steinberg had spent more than 50 hours discussing his life experiences. The Number is an account of their conversations and of Steinberg’s journeys to the places and people of Wentzel’s past.

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Three Letter Plague

Three-Letter Plague

In this eye-opening, compassionate, searing and beautifully written account, Steinberg seeks to understand the AIDS crisis in South Africa. As he grapples to get closer to answers that remain maddeningly just out of reach, he realises that he must look within to unravel some of the enigma surrounding the greatest African disaster of our times.

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6. Winnie & Nelson

Winnie & Nelson

One of the most celebrated political leaders of our time, Nelson Mandela has been written about by many biographers and historians. But in one crucial area, his life remains largely untold: his marriage to Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Jonny Steinberg tells the tale of this unique marriage – its longings, its obsessions, its deceits – making South African history a page-turning political biography.

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