The Ethics of Narrative Non-Fiction: writing about the living, the wounded and the ill-at-ease

Part of the Modern School and 'Prison Fiction and Human Rights' Project

Jonny Steinberg is the author of 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 South African farmer, and The Number (2004), a biography of a prison gangster, won South Africa’s premier nonfiction award, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg’s books also include Three-Letter Plague, which chronicles a young man’s journey through South Africa’s AIDS pandemic.  It was a Washington Post Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Award, among others.  Steinberg is also the author of Thin Blue (2008), an exploration of the unwritten rules of engagement between South African civilians and police. His latest book, Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, about the Liberian civil war and its aftermath in an exile community in New York, was published in 2011.

Steinberg has a doctorate in political theory from the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.  He is currently a lecturer in African Studies at Oxford.

This talk follows on from the earlier discussion, How to tell tales about tales: writing about the stories South African prisoners tell.