Since 2003, Johannesburg has been home to Stephanie Nolen, The Globe and Mail’s Africa correspondent. South Africa’s largest city is one of the world’s most dangerous. Nolen lives there with her partner, Meril Rasmussen, a filmmaker, and their nine-month-old son, Darragh. Their home is protected by a 13-foot cement wall, iron gates and an electric fence. They sleep in a bedroom behind another set of gates. There is a panic button on the wall, which will quickly summon armed security personnel. Nolen’s key chain contains 17 keys—“You don’t leave the house quickly,” she says. She frequently travels into one of the world’s most dangerous areas: wartorn, disease-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa. She has bivouacked with naked Dinka tribespeople. She has watched her toenails rot off after a gruelling trek through the swamps of southern Sudan.

The stories she has filed from some two dozen African countries have won her National Newspaper Awards two years in a row. She also received the Amnesty International Award for Human Rights Reporting in 2003, 2004 and 2006. She has written about the child soldiers of Uganda, covered Oprah Winfrey’s visit to the orphans of Zambia, told the story of a woman raped in Rwanda by hundreds of men over a three-month period. She just published her third book, 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa. She has a personal Web site, where she comes across as an intriguing mix of glamourpuss (her photo looks like something out of a fashion magazine), archly self-important (her bio reads like an ad for single-malt scotch), and ardently committed to alerting the world to the social and economic catastrophe that is HIV/AIDS in Africa. She’s that intriguing mix in person, too. Philippe Devos, one of the editors on the Globe’s foreign desk, says that she is “not the typical intrepid foreign correspondent. When we met, she was talking about these pink shoes that she wanted to get to match her pink handbag. It was so refreshing that she didn’t come off as weighty as her reputation.”

She doesn’t seem to carry that “pink purse” mentality into the field, though, and registers a certain amount of contempt for the cadre known as “dish bitches,” men and women who file their war zone reports via satellite from some safe vantage point. “When I was in Beirut in 1996,” she says, “I’d heard that I could find the foreign correspondents in the bar of the Hotel Commodore. They were always there, and when they did their stories they did them from the roof, while I was down in the streets picking cement out of my hair.”

She’s far from the only foreign correspondent to get down and dirty in pursuit of a story (her “patron saint” is Martha Gellhorn, who reported brilliantly from the thick of conflicts ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989), but in an era of news as entertainment, as quick-bite summaries, she relishes the long tale, steeped in close and intimate contact with the men, women and children in history’s fierce grip. They’re not just tug-your-heartstrings exercises in poignant prose, though; her stories sit solidly within a framework that analyzes the political, historical and economic forces at play. She’s frequently right on the mark. A piece she did in 1999 on the impact of oil drilling in Sudan prompted an attack from the British-Sudanese Public Affairs Council (a front, she claims, for the Khartoum government). According to Nolen, the council published and widely circulated a rebuttal “16 pages long, on thick, glossy paper, no less (if one is going to be defamed, one wants the production values to be high), with the catchy title ‘Poor Journalism or Islamophobic Prejudice?’ ” The accusations, she says, were easily refuted, but adds that “it was handy, in a perverse way, to be called an Islamaphobe, since I’d been accused of various sympathies by a half-dozen other interest groups, including excess sympathy for Muslims—and as my then-boss said, if everyone hates you, you’re doing your job right.”

That bit of isolationist bravado is pure Nolen. There is something permanently, ingratiatingly (and sometimes irritatingly) hungry about her, a sense that too much will never be quite enough. She still has a student’s fierce energies, cramming for life rather than for an exam, managing to complete her latest book through the travails of pregnancy and the birth of her son. Though her partner is male, she describes herself as queer, and has had affairs with both men and women, another reflection, perhaps, of her unquenchable appetites.