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Annick Stevenson is a journalist, author and translator who was born on November 9, 1948 in Lyon , France . Her mother was from the Ardèche and her father from the Provençal 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.
For nearly 20 years Annick Stevenson was an international journalist for the United Nations. She began her UN career with an 18-month assignment at 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 in charge of 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 at 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 has since written primarily for the Lyon daily Le Progrès (literary reviews, tourism, international politics and cultural events in and around Geneva ) and occasionally for other newspapers and magazines. From 2006 to the present she has been 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.
As well as hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles, she has also co-authored two books on regional tourism in France : La Côte d'azur (1996) and Lyon et la vallée du Rhône (1997), published by Editions Larousse and France Loisirs.
In 2002 Sergio Vieira de Mello was appointed UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Geneva and Annick Stevenson returned to the United Nations to become his spokesperson. Following the August 2003 bombing of the United Nations Headquarters in Bagdad that took the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello, who had been sent on a special mission to Iraq by Kofi Annan, 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).
Her latest book, Blanche Meyer et Jean Giono (Arles, Editions Actes Sud, 2007), is the 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.
Annick Stevenson is also a founding member and current member of the Board of Directors of the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights in Geneva .