Author and journalist Åsne Seierstad has worked in some of the world’s fiercest warzones and, while her impending motherhood has caused her to take herself out of the firing line, she says she feels duty-bound to report on the evils that people perpetrate against one another.

Fearless, you would wager, after just a glance at her. An open-faced beauty, Åsne Seierstad is carved in relief from the chintz sofa at her back, like something adorning the prow of the Argo. She could be a talking figurehead cut from an oak tree sacred to Zeus, rather than a five months pregnant Norwegian war reporter deserting a half-eaten lunch in a Dublin hotel.

But Seierstad knows all about fear, having lived side-by-side with it during 14 years of war reporting in Russia, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan and Iraq. She describes herself as a restless soul with ‘‘a lot of curiosity and a little bit of fearlessness’’. Although she says bluntly that nothing is worth getting shot for, as a child her parents puzzled over why Seierstad seemed afraid of nothing.

‘‘How do you deal with fear? You just forget about it. But it comes back again as soon as someone is shooting at you. You have to weigh up the options before you go [to a warzone] and fall down on one side or the other. ‘‘I have always tried to be wise, tried to minimise risks. But definitely I’ve wanted to go and find out. I haven’t thought so much of myself. I decided not to go back to Iraq because it’s too dangerous, considering what you get out of it. If I was to go I would be afraid before landing that there could be a suicide bomber, that any of these people could be a suicide bomber. . .when you start to get those suspicions then you just can’t be there.”

In 2002, Seierstad gave up the frontlines and moved in with an Afghan family to research amore personal story of the effects of war. Her subsequent book, The Bookseller of Kabul, made her almost as famous as the war she had covered there. In her story of the family life of a book dealer in Afghanistan, Seierstad contrasted the protagonist’s brave work saving Kabul’s books from the Taliban, with his medieval Islamic ideas about women.

The book, which was gobbled up by book clubs around the world, again made headlines when its semi-fictionalised subject, Mohammed Shah Rais, prepared a libel suit against the author. He claimed Seierstad told lies about his family and gave a distorted view of Afghan culture to the outside world. Seierstad stoically stands by her account - ‘‘the reader can judge’’ - and hopes that her latest book, The Angel of Grozny, will bring the same focus on the people of Chechnya that The Bookseller of Kabul brought to the plight of the women of Kabul.

The new book charts Seierstad’s first experience of war - when she landed in the Chechnyan capital as a 24-year-old reporter covering the Russian invasion of Chechnya - and also her return to the brutalised landscape a decade later. Her return was necessary, she says, because Chechnya has been forgotten. Like Afghanistan and Kosovo, Chechnya is a ‘‘hidden mess’’ being smothered by a brutal new regime. Ten per cent of its population of one million people were killed during ten years of conflict.

Travelling in secret in 2006 and 2007, Seierstad met people broken and wounded by the prolonged, bloody conflict that continues in Chechnya to this day.

‘‘Putin chose Kadyrov to lead the new regime because he is so brutal,” says Seierstad, speaking with the clipped, efficient English of the Nordic races. Ramzan Kadyrov, a 30-year-old amateur boxer and Moscow loyalist, is accused by human rights groups of murdering and kidnapping civilians in the war-torn republic.

Seierstad’s account of her hour-long interview with the new president is one of the most insightful parts of the book. She meets head-on the claim that Kadyrov was behind the murder in 2006 of Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist who had documented Chechnya’s plight.

‘‘There is no limit to his violence - he has constructed a society built on fear, on terror; people are afraid to react, turn out at demonstrations, raise their voices. They know that if they are not met with something, something will happen to their cousin, their grandfather.”

Although she has an in-depth knowledge of the macro politics at work in the region, Seierstad works on a micro level, leaving ‘‘the big picture’’ for others to report. The result, The Angel of Grozny, is a small-scale gathering of human stories which centres on a woman Seierstad calls Hadijat, her ‘‘angel’’ who set up an orphanage and began to care for the street children of Grozny after losing her unborn child in a car accident.

The identities of most of the people in the book have been protected, but a small number wanted their names to be printed, such as the parents of two families who had lost all their children to the conflict.

‘‘Like they say, it is dangerous to speak, it is dangerous to keep quiet, so now I want to speak, I am tired of keeping quiet,” Seierstad says.

Part war reportage, part memoir, part sociological study, The Angel of Grozny is novelistic and full - but not heavy - with imagery.

Although there is no journalist without opinions - “‘you may guess my political opinions from the book: I think the Russians are very guilty and I also think the Chechens are guilty’’ - Seierstad says she has provided a true and fair-minded account of her subject.

‘‘The book can be read as a lesson in war. The war could have stopped in the first day, but it is still going on 12 years later, so it’s not a lesson learned.”

However, Seierstad’s work as a writer of non-fiction has been criticised for its slant, if not for its adherence to fact. The danger is evident in the emotive opening chapter of The Angel of Grozny, which begins with an imagined narrative from an omniscient author, based on conversations Seierstad had with the children over months spent boarding and teaching at the orphanage.

She tells the story of ‘The Little Wolf’, an 11-year-old boy called Timur who, together with his sister Liana, are now living under Hadijat’s care. The children were sent to live with an uncle after their parents and grandparents died. Timur has spent his ruined childhood bludgeoning dogs to death on the street, where he was sent to scavenge by his uncle, who repeatedly raped Liana. Despite receiving love and care in the orphanage, he can’t help killing things. Liana herself is a compulsive thief.

‘‘This is the most difficult book I have written. You might think the experience in Afghanistan is worse - the women in the Bookseller who sit at home and have no prospects, but the saddest thing for them is that they are living half a life.

‘‘To see the children who have gone through so much and are so destroyed is so much worse. How are you going to mend up Timur, or Liana? How you gonna do that? I don’t know. Not even with the best treatment in the world, and they don’t get any treatment at all.”

Seierstad says her first journey to Grozny was one of her most confused moments - ‘‘for the first time in my life, I was weighing my life in my hands’’- when she no longer recognised her own face in the mirror - ‘‘those eyes, my eyes, they were filled with horror’’. Later, she would be shot at and, tumbling into a ditch, arrive at a Russian checkpoint only to be dragged towards the woods by a soldier waving a Kalashnikov. She narrowly escaped being raped. But meeting the children of Grozny, she says, was by far the worst experience of her years of war.

Seierstad says it is unlikely she will ever get a visa to travel back to Chechnya, but she is in regular contact with Hadijat and has since set up a bakery in Grozny, where she hopes Liana might work some day. ‘‘Hadijat says Liana is still stealing. Maybe a miracle happens and she grows out of it, but she can’t grow out of her problems because she can’t cope with her life.

‘‘In a society like hers where she is just waiting to get married - who’s going to marry her? She will be judged by her past and will probably end up a single mother. Hadijat says she should leave Chechnya because everyone knows her story.”

In documenting the fate of the child, already sealed, Seierstad is referring to another negative effect of the war in Chechnya: the resurgence of radical Islam with its attendant blood feuds and honour killings.

‘‘One subject constantly crops up in Chechen conversations,” Seierstad writes.

‘‘Honour. A soldier’s honour. A nation’s honour. A leader’s honour. A woman’s honour. It’s the latter that riles people most. Honour killings are widespread. Very widespread. When I ask the women sitting around the table one evening, they all know of numerous instances . . .”

She says the war has radicalised religious thoughts and the cruelty of people, and begins to tell the story of Abdul, a boy who killed his sister for being seen with men who were not relations.

‘‘Someone asked me how did I know it was not something Abdul had invented. Well I could say ‘I just know’, but that is not an answer. It was the way he told it. He was very specific. I was told I could ask him anything, but not to judge him. So I asked specific questions – how did she lie, what did the blood look like, how were her eyes? It was also my way of being a bit cruel with him – I wanted him to remember it. That’s when he started to cry. I wrote down in my notebook ‘cry’ as it happened.”

For a nation top-heavy with women and children, Seierstad says female liberation is a far way off in Chechnya. From the top down women receive the same message, ‘stay at home and be housewives’.

Having received the feminist message as ‘‘mother’s milk’’, Seierstad says she often finds herself being blase about the existence of a gender divide. Whenever she does, she remembers Chechnya.

‘‘Why should the honour of the brother be more important than his sister’s life? Even the women who knew about the killing supported it, saying ‘oh it’s so sad and of course we grieve for her, but you have to behave’ and ‘this is a lesson for other girls that you have to be a real Chechen woman’.

‘‘And it makes me so angry - what about the boys? They don’t have to behave? Because no one is going to kill them if they walk outside.”

But somehow, despite her fearlessness, intellect, osmotic feminism, the reporting has stopped. Nature, it seems, has put a stop to Seierstad’s wanderlust for war reporting, in away that all her parents’ pleadings over the years could not.

‘‘As women, we do our studies, we have our careers but there is a limit to how far we can postpone . . .” She stops, saying she is reluctant to talk about her unborn child, but resumes quickly: ‘‘In theory, it’s not right to go to war if you have children at all - but then that leaves the war reporting to the youngsters and the single men and women!

‘‘There was a Norwegian journalist, a friend of mine, who was killed in Kabul. He had two daughters aged four and eight. And should he have gone? I’m not superstitious, but I feel I have taken my fair share of dangers. When you have children, it’s no longer a matter of choice.”

The Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya is published by Virago €16.50. Seierstad will be interviewed by Seamus Martin on April 24 in the Town Hall Theatre in Galway as part of the Cuirt International Festival of Literature 2008