Claude B. Levenson (2 August 1938 – 13 December 2010) was a French journalist, orientalist, Tibetologist, translator and writer who authored approximately twenty-five books on the subjects of Buddhism, Burma and Tibet.
[1] She was the daughter of a Jew from Bessarabia who would become a resistance fighter during the Second World War when France was under occupation but who was murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz in 1941.
[6] She first met the Tibetan religious leader Dalai Lama in Paris in 1981 and she maintained a friendship with him over the following decades,[1][2][3] working as an interpreter for him.
[6][5] She ventured to Tibet for the first time in 1984 after a meeting with the Dalai Lama the previous year in Geneva and she remained there until her visa was terminated by Beijing in 2005.
[1] In May 2011, the Théâtre du Soleil hosted a tribute evening to Levenson with the show Je suis le cœur d’un peuple, which was a presentation of readings of poems in Chinese, French and Tibetan.