Jonny Steinberg was born and bred in South Africa. He is the author of critically acclaimed Three Letter Plague, published by Vintage, Little Liberia, Midlands and The Number, which both won South Africa's premier non-fiction literary award and the Sunday Times Alan Paton Prize. Steinberg was educated at Wits University in Johannesburg, and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He has worked as a journalist on a national daily, written scripts for television drama, and has been a consultant to the South African government on criminal justice policy.