Jonny Steinberg Wins 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for ‘Winnie & Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage’

The MacMillan Center is pleased to announce that Jonny Steinberg has won the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography for Winnie & Nelson: A Portrait of a Marriage.

Steinberg is Senior Lecturer in Political Science at Yale and a member of the Council on African Studies at the Yale MacMillan Center for International & Area Studies. In Winnie & Nelson, he explores a century of South African history through the prism of the marriage of Nelson Mandela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela.

The Washington Post calls the book “a powerful, tragic portrait of a historic marriage.” With quotes from newly-available transcripts of Mandela and Winnie’s conversations—secretly recorded by Robben Island prison guards during his decades-long incarceration—The Guardian asserts that “what comes through on every page of Winnie & Nelson is the deep inhumanity of apartheid and the people who enforced it; the profound carelessness and indifference with which the authorities ruined millions of Black people’s lives.” The New York Times applauded Steinberg for bringing the couple “back to Earth” with this new biography, saying, “‘Winnie and Nelson’ arrives at a moment of widespread disillusion, especially among the young, about South Africa’s negotiated settlement and the halo over Nelson’s head.”

Steinberg is currently working on a biography of the late nineteenth-century British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. He taught two seminars at Yale this year: ‘Pandemics in Africa: From the Spanish Influenza to Covid-19,’ and ‘Bureaucracy in Africa: Revolution, Genocide, and Apartheid’.

He is the author of seven previous books, most of them about everyday life in South Africa in the period stretching from late apartheid to the present. He was an inaugural winner of Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes and was twice winner of South Africa’s premier nonfiction prize, the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award. Until 2020, he was Professor of African Studies at Oxford University and Visiting Professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (Wiser) at Wits University in Johannesburg.