Steavenson, Wendell 1970-

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STEAVENSON, Wendell 1970-

PERSONAL:

Born 1970, in NY.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Grove/Atlantic Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003-4793.

CAREER:

Journalist and author. Former Time correspondent.

WRITINGS:

Stories I Stole from Georgia, Grove Press (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor to periodicals including Slate and Pastimes.

SIDELIGHTS:

Wendell Steavenson was born in New York, grew up in London, and became a correspondent for Time magazine. In 1998 she became bored with her life, quit her job, and decided to take off for the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, where she spent the next two years writing about her experiences in that troubled region. When Steavenson returned to England to sell the book based on her experiences, Stories I Stole from Georgia, she received twenty-four rejections from publishers before Grove agreed to print the book.

Steavenson's home base in Georgia was the town of Tbilisi, and she recounts the hardships of the people there; for example, old men tried to make a living by selling violets stolen from the woods. Stories I Stole from Georgia also details how the country's infrastructure is so decrepit that the electricity only comes on for short, unscheduled periods of time. Nevertheless, Steavenson recounts many occassions where Georgians lived up to their fame as hosts. During her stay, she meets a host of colorful characters, including a man who is misguidedly building a shrine to Joseph Stalin, a Georgian native. Other encounters include two shady businessmen who end up in a sort of duel over their wives and then, after both are badly injured, go off and sink into depression, alcoholism, and heroin use.

At one point, Steavenson stays in an abandoned palace built by former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. In fact, Georgia is falling apart so badly that Steavenson keeps a list of large abandoned objects, or "LAOs," which includes everything from rusting tank hulls to ruined factories to blocks of gutted apartments. Steavenson, who tells her story in the first person, also appears as a lively character who describes her days of living on cigarettes, cheap wine, and vodka. In one chapter, she recounts her brief but torrid love affair with a German photographer. He quickly dumps her, returns to propose marriage, and then sends her 1,000 red roses after she rejects him. The book includes a bibliography as well, which, according to Frank Caso, writing in Booklist, "is actually fun to read."

Stories I Stole from Georgia received almost universal praise from reviewers, who noted that Steavenson is able to capture the warmth and kindness of the Georgian people even as they battle an oppressive state of life. A Publishers Weekly contributor called the book one "that Chekhov himself would have admired." Neal Ascherson, writing in the London Observer, noted, "This is the first published book of a practiced and very gifted writer, a young Kapuściński with a literary future ahead of her." Library Journal contributor Rebecca Bollen called the book a "captivating mix of personal and political anecdotes cleverly woven into an entertaining whole." In a review for Time International, Christopher J. Redman commented that readers who wanted to be "led by the hand" through a travelogue of Georgia history should avoid the book but that those who "prefer to be taken by the heart" should read the "meticulously observed account," which he also called "brilliantly illuminating."

When asked by Amy Spurling of Pastimes whether writing a book has changed her life, Steavenson replied that she was surprised to find that editors of national newspapers began to seek her out for work and noted that "all of a sudden you have creditability, you're no longer nebulous." Steavenson headed to Iraq in 2003 when the war broke out and wrote a series of dispatches for Slate.