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.
[5] In 2009, she published The Weight of a Mustard Seed which explored the stories of high level Ba’ath Party officials including Kamel Sachet, a general who commanded the army in Kuwait City during the first Gulf War who was executed on the orders of Saddam Hussein in 1998.
[7] The title of the book came from a Koranic verse which vowed to deliver justice even to the “weight of a mustard seed.”[8] In 2015, Steavenson published Circling the Square.
[13] 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.
[17][1] In 2023, she was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Journalism for four articles published with The Economist: "The inside story of Chernobyl during the Russian occupation", "Electric shocks, savage dogs and daily beatings: three weeks in Russia as a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war", "The barista-partisan who targeted the Russians in Kherson", and "East of Mariupol: what happened to the Ukrainians who fled to Russia?