Steavenson started her career as a correspondent for
Time in London. In 1998, she moved to
Tbilisi, Georgia, then spent two years writing about her experiences there, publishing
Stories I Stole with
Grove Press in 2002. In 2003, Steavenson moved to Iraq and wrote about the
Iraq War for
Slate. The title of the book came from a Koranic verse which vowed to deliver justice even to the “weight of a mustard seed.” In 2015, Steavenson published
Circling the Square. The book documents her experience of the events of the
2011 Egyptian revolution to the
June 2013 Egyptian protests which were centered around Cairo’s
Tahrir Square. The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Orwell Prize for Books. In 2018, Steavenson published her debut novel,
Paris Metro. The protagonist, Kit, is a Western journalist who like Steavenson has covered international crises in the Middle East. The
November 2015 Paris attacks form the climax of the novel, with Kit at the scene of the massacre at the
Bataclan theatre. During the
Russo-Ukrainian War, Steavenson reported from Ukraine for
1843. In 2023, Steavenson published
Margot, a coming-of-age story of a young woman with an interest in science growing up in a post–WWII American upper class environment in the 1950s and 1960s. ==Awards and honors==