Born on 29 January 1937 in
Geneva, Laurence Deonna was the daughter of the economist and politician Raymond Deonna, who headed the board of the former
Journal de Genève, and his wife Anne-Marie Vernet-Faesch. She left school before matriculating, attended art school in London and returned to Geneva to work in an art gallery. She was married for a short period between 1961 and 1963. In 1967, invited to report on the
Six-Day War, she embarked on a long career as a journalist in the Middle-East, where she took a special interest in the lives of Arab women. Realizing that books offered a more lasting way than newspapers of covering countries in depth, she went on to publish many lengthy accounts of her trips abroad over the next 40 years. They were frequently illustrated with her photographs. ==Selected works==