KZN Literary Tourism featured writer, Jonny Steinberg, has as a new professor at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WiSER). Steinberg’s appointment forms part of Vice Chancellor Adam Habib’s Distinguished Professorships programme and he is set to join the WiSER staff in 2015.
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 are published by Jonathan Ball Publishers.
Steinberg published three books in 2008. The first was titled Sizwe’s Test and was published in the US by Simon and Schuster. The second, titled Three-Letter Plague was published in South Africa by Jonathan Ball Publishers, and 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. The third book published in 2008 is called Thin Blue, also published by Jonathon Ball Publishers, and it is about police on the streets of Johannesburg.
Sarah Nuttall, director of WiSER, says: “Steinberg is a public intellectual of note, a multitalented writer whose insightful and engaging work covers a remarkably wide range of topics related to some of the fundamental questions facing South Africa and the African continent today.
“Steinberg’s body of work is an outstanding fit with WiSER’s focus on social, economic and cultural research in an interdisciplinary vein, reaching across many and varied publics.
“Jonny’s dedication to teaching and his contribution to the re-invigoration of the public and civic realms will enormously benefit WiSER, Wits University and the South African academy at large.”
Find out more about Jonny Steinberg’s appointment at WiSER over on the BOOKSLIVE website.
