Steve Jacobs was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1955. He studied law at the University of Cape Town, and after a year spent working on a kibbutz in Israel he practised as an advocate in Johannesburg. After leaving the legal profession he worked as a journalist, a bookseller and a property manager. He also worked on a photographic camp in Botswana. He is an active campaigner for human and animal rights, and has been a Trustee of Beauty without Cruelty, worked with squatters at the Crossroads township, and been a member of Koeberg Alert, an organisation opposing a nuclear power station. He is currently sub-editor of the Straits Times of Singapore in their office in Sydney, Australia. A collection of his short stories, Light in a Stark Age, was published in 1984 (Ravan Press). This was followed by two novellas, published as Diary of an Exile (Ad. Donker, 1986) and the novels Under the Lion (Heinemann, 1993) and The Enemy Within (Heinemann, 1995), which was shortlisted for the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize from Africa.