Jonny Steinberg is a South African writer, journalist, and policy analyst. As an Open Society Fellow, Steinberg is writing a book about a Liberian diaspora community in a Staten Island housing project and the ways in which its members have carried memories of civil war with them to New York. The book explores whether truth and reconciliation proceedings can help heal the wounds that postwar diasporas bear.

Steinberg has written several books about everyday life in the wake of South Africa’s transition to democracy. Two of them, Midlands (2002), about the murder of a white farmer, and The Number (2004), about crime and punishment in Cape Town’s ghettos, won South Africa’s premier nonfiction literary award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize.

Steinberg is also the author of Thin Blue (2008), a book about the unwritten rules of engagement between police and urban residents in contemporary South Africa. His latest book, published in the U.S. in 2008 as Sizwe’s Test, chronicles a young man’s journey through South Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Steinberg has served as a columnist at Business Day, South Africa’s leading financial daily, and his journalism is collected in the book Notes from a Fractured Country (2007).

Steinberg has written extensively on South Africa’s criminal justice system for the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria and the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation in Johannesburg. He has a doctorate in political theory from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

New York, NY  |  Jan 2009 - Dec 2009