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Annick Stevenson is a journalist, author, translator and teacher who was born on November 9, 1948 in Lyon, France. Her mother was from the Ardèche and her father from the Provence region. She lives in the Haute-Savoie near the city of Geneva with her husband, Roger Stevenson, who was a professor of French language and literature for more than 20 years in the state of Oregon in the United States. She is the mother of a daughter, Céline Anthonioz, who is the director and founder of an internet school of French as a foreign language, where she wears several hats as a member of the instructional and administrative team.
For nearly 20 years Annick Stevenson was an international journalist for the United Nations. She began her UN career with an 18-month assignment in the Francophone press office at the UN headquarters in New York. She was then given a six-month assignment in Hyderabad, India, following which she settled in Switzerland (where her father's side of the family has its roots) in order to work for the UN High Commission for Refugees in Geneva. She founded and for a period of 15 years was the editor-in-chief of the monthly magazine Refugees, during which time she travelled to more than 70 different countries to report on the plight of refugees. She also spent a year in Irak immediately following the first Gulf War of 1991 where she was in charge of press relations for Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. She then spent a year in Cambodia where she was responsible for press relations for Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was directing the UN program of repatriation of Cambodian refugees from camps in Thailand . She also spent five months in Sarajevo during the siege of the city (winter of 1993-94). She was responsible for public relations for Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN Secretary General's Special Representative in Bosnia. In 1994 she resigned her position with the UN and moved to the United States where she lived first in California and then in Oregon.
She returned to France in 1997 and worked as a journalist. She is now a member of the editorial team of the on-line, bi-lingual (French/English) magazine, French Accent, which is designed to facilitate the cultural and social integration and French language acquisition for Anglophones of various origins. She also teaches on-line French classes to students from Japan, Australia, and various other countries. She has authored a number of books and is currently working on several other book projects.
In October 2002, she returned for a short stint with the United Nations as spokesperson for Sergio Vieira de Mello after he was appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva. Following the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations Headquarters in Bagdad that took the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello, she co-authored, together with George Gordon-Lennox, Sergio Vieira de Mello: An Exceptional Man (Geneva, Editions du Tricorne, 2004). She has also collaborated on a book entitled Passions d'Ardèche (Lyon, Editions Stéphane Bachès & Septéditions, 2005) and she, together with her husband, translated a book on stolen art work throughout the world, Museum of the Missing: Inside the High-Stakes World of Art Theft (French title – Tableaux volés : Enquêtes sur les vols dans le monde de l'art) by Simon Houpt (Lyon, Editions Stéphane Bachès, 2006).
In 2007, she published Blanche Meyer et Jean Giono (Arles, Editions Actes Sud), the literary account of the thirty-five-year relationship between the novelist and his mistress/inspiration/muse, a relationship and influence that has been totally ignored by Giono's biographers and critics over the years.
In 2009, she published two works on the United Nations:
- Kofi Annan (Editions du Tricorne), the French translation and adaptation of a biography of Kofi Annan written by his spokesman Fred Eckhard.
- Planet UN (Editions du Tricorne & Le Monde diplomatique), on the challenges facing the United Nations in the future. Planet UN is the first history of the United Nations published in French and includes the perspectives of some 60 UN officials interviewed for a documentary film by film-maker Romuald Sciora (co-author of the book).
In August 2011, her first novel, Génération Nothomb, has been published by Editions Luce Wilquin. Based on a real story and laced with actual excerpts from internet blogs and forums, it tells how a young man discovered the pleasure of reading and totally reoriented his life all because of a book by the novelist Amélie Nothomb.