Jonny Steinberg wins the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Award
- Wits Alumni Relations
Witsie becomes the first three-time winner in history of the prize and second Wits graduate in a row to win SA’s biggest literary award.
Wits alumnus, social scientist and historian Professor Jonny Steinberg (BA 1992, BA Hons 1993, MA 1996) is the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Award winner.
At a ceremony held on 31 October 2024, Steinberg received the award for what is considered “the best of South African non-fiction” for his dual biography Winnie & Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage (Jonathan Ball, 2023).
In the 34th anniversary of the non-fiction prize, Steinberg also received R100,000, making the award one of the richest literary prizes in South Africa.
The biography has been described by judges as “the work of a generational talent”.
Steinberg is currently teaching two seminars at Yale, “Pandemics in Africa: From the Spanish Influenza to COVID-19,” and “Bureaucracy in Africa”. Until 2020, he was Professor of African Studies at Oxford University and Visiting Professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser). He becomes the first three-time winner in the history of the Sunday Times literary awards, 11 years after his initial win for Midlands (Jonathan Ball, 2002), which was followed by The Number (Jonathan Ball, 2004).
When asked about the recognition, Steinberg told Alumni Relations: “Winning this prize again is an enormous honour. The writing process itself is so full of doubt and fear; it's hard to know, in the thick of things, whether the book has come together. And so, to be recognised by an esteemed panel is wonderful affirmation and really means a great deal.”
The judges said: “Steinberg has taken a story that is extremely well-known and still manages to keep us engaged. Like a Greek tragedy, we watch, enthralled and at times appalled, as Steinberg unearths their personal secrets presenting them back to us, never out of prurience or sensationalism but with incredible sensitivity to allow us to better understand the two greatest actors of the South African story.
“His ability to take two very different and iconic characters and give them both equal time without the one overshadowing or overwhelming the other, but instead complementing each so that the whole becomes far greater than the sum of their parts, is another example of his biographer’s skill. It is even more impressive given the fact that Madikizela-Mandela was a notoriously reluctant biographical subject. Finally, Steinberg’s timing was impeccable. Any earlier than South Africa’s 30th anniversary would have been too soon, but now his book provides a perfect backdrop and an invitation to reflect on South Africa’s journey not just over the last 30 years, but of the fuller panoply of an entire nation’s long walk to freedom, which is still barely past the foothills.
“Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage fulfils the injunction in the description of the Sunday Times Literary Awards non-fiction category; the book is the illumination of truthfulness, it is new and delicate. It is unfashionable. It does fly in the face of power (and accepted dogma). It is filled with compassion. Steinberg’s intellectual and moral integrity shine through on every page.
“It has been an immense honour for us to serve as the judging panel for the 2024 Sunday Times Literary Awards. The awards espouse values we individually and collectively cherish – celebrating and showcasing the best in South Africa’s literary landscape. While our judging panel is comprised of individuals from diverse backgrounds, we are united by a shared passion for books and South African literature in particular.”
This dual biography has also been shortlisted for the prestigious 2024 Wolfson Prize.
Fellow Witsie Jarred Thompson (MA 2022) was among the shortlisted candidates in the fiction category for his novel The Institute for Creative Dying (Picador 2023).
Last year Johannesburg-based attorney, Bulelwa Mabasa (BA 2000, LLB 2002), was the winner of the non-fiction award for My Land Obsession: A Memoir (Picador, 2022).
Sources: Sunday Times and April 2023 edition of WITSReview.