Jonny Steinberg (born 22 March 1970) is a South African writer and scholar. In the mid-1990s he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship and studied at Oxford University's Balliol college, from which he graduated with a doctorate in political theory. He returned to South Africa in 1998 and worked for the national daily newspaper Business Day, writing on the Constitutional Court and the police. He left Business Day to write the book Midlands, which explores racial conflict in the post-apartheid countryside through an account of an unsolved murder.
In 2003, Midlands received South Africa's most prestigious literary prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for non-fiction. Two years later Steinberg repeated this feat when his second book, The Number, a social history of crime and punishment in Cape Town written in the form of a biography of a prison gangster, received the same award. Midlands also received the National Booksellers' Choice award in 2003. Both books [1] are published by Jonathan Ball Publishers. [2]
Steinberg is publishing two books in 2008. The first, titled Sizwe’s Test in the US (Simon and Schuster) and Three-Letter Plague in South Africa (Jonathan Ball Publishers), explores the ways in which the arrival of antiretroviral drugs in an Eastern Cape village infiltrates the life of a successful young shopkeeper. The book was published in the UK and in Italy in 2009. Steinberg has also written a book about police on the streets of Johannesburg. Titled Thin Blue, it will be published by Jonathan Ball Publishers in Johannesburg in May 2008.
In 2011, Steinberg published a new book, Little Liberia in which he traces conflict within the Liberian community in New York back to its roots in Liberia and traces the history of its protagonists. The book was launched in Cape Town in February 2011 and is published in South Africa by Jonathan Ball publishers. [3] It is published in the USA by Jonathan Cape [4] and in the UK by Random House [5] .
A selection of Steinberg’s columns in Business Day, titled Notes from a Fractured Country, was published by Jonathan Ball Publishers in 2007.
Steinberg has published a number of monographs and research papers on South Africa's criminal justice system for the Institute for Security Studies [6] in Pretoria and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation [7] in Johannesburg. He has edited two books on contemporary South Africa: From Comrades to Citizens (with Glen Adler), published by Routledge in 2000, and Crime Wave: The South African Underworld and its Foes, published by Wits University Press in 2001.