In an epilogue to Little Liberia, his 2011 account of an African diaspora in New York, Jonny Steinberg records a telephone conversation with a man whose life he has just spent two years researching. The author has given Jacob Massaquoi a printout of the manuscript, along with a note proposing that 50% of the royalties be channelled to community projects. Four days later he receives a call:

Reading a book-length description of yourself for the first time, the author remarks, is a shock for anyone who has had the experience. It marks the moment at which your embellishments, evasions and self-presentations – as recorded in the researcher's notebooks or audio files over many months – are wrested violently into a narrative contrivance that is recognisable but other: ‘The writer has cheated. He has written a you that is not you’ (260). Most find the experience confusing: ‘Something is wrong, but how to put one's finger on it? Where does one's complaint begin?’ (260)

Where does one begin with Steinberg's non-fiction? Where to find a point of departure that has not been pre-empted by the self-aware and hyper-articulate persona at the centre of his works? Anticipating, articulating and even relishing the range of ethical quandaries generated by the process of writing so intimately about people from worlds very different to his own – this set piece of authorial consternation in Little Liberia recurs in different guises all through his wide-ranging body of work.

It is one that began by addressing, in quick succession, the murder of a KwaZulu-Natal farmer as a window into that region's racially charged land disputes (Midlands, 2002); social engineering, prison gangs and violent criminality in the Western Cape (The Number, 2004); and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, medical history and social stigma in Pondoland (Three-Letter Plague, 2008). This loose ‘trilogy’ of books on some of South Africa's most contested subjects established Steinberg as perhaps the country's foremost practitioner of narrative non-fiction or (as American respondents to his work tend to call it) literary journalism.