Nane Annan: Lawyer, artist and wife of UN's Nobel laureate

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 12 (AFP) - When Kofi Annan, this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner, decided in March to seek a second term as UN Secretary General, nobody had a greater influence on him than his wife of 17 years, Nane.

The "exhausting claims on my family and my personal life" had to be weighed against the responsibility to continue working for peace, development and human rights, Annan said at the time.

As Annan greeted a delighted crowd of hundreds of UN staff after the Nobel announcement on Friday, his wife stood discreetly beside him, a tall, elegant figure unfailingly, if reluctantly, sharing the glare of publicity.

"I am so delighted, it's such a boost for everyone," she told one of her husband's staff at the ceremony.

"As long as I have known him, I know that he has strongly identified with suffering," she added.

In a children's book which she published last year, Nane Annan noted another side to her husband's character.

His country, Ghana, was the first in Africa to become independent of colonial rule, she wrote, adding "it gave him a wonderful sense that everything is possible."

The book, "The United Nations, come along with me," is illustrated by children but also by Nane Annan, who took up painting full-time in 1985. Since then, she has taken part in several group exhibitions, including two for the benefit of the UN Children's Fund, UNICEF.

Nane Annan is the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who helped thousands of Jews to escape from the Nazis during World War II and who disappeared mysteriously in Budapest as Soviet troops entered the city in 1945.

In August this year, she and her husband unveiled a monument to Wallenberg in Stockholm, the city where Nane Lagergren was born.

In Stockholm, she studied law, taking a degree in 1968, before becoming an assistant judge at the administrative and fiscal court of appeal.

She later took leave from the court to work with a parliamentary commission on ethnic prejudice and discrimination, before joining the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva as a legal officer in 1981.

That was the year UNHCR won the second of its two Nobel Peace Prizes -- the first was in 1954 -- it was also the year that Nane and Kofi Annan met. She accompanied him two years later to New York, where they married in 1984.

Since her husband's election as secretary general in December 1996, Nane Annan has focused on women's issues, programmes designed to alleviate poverty, and the welfare of children, refugees and the disabled.

However, according to a biographical note issued by the UN, "given her and her husband's sudden loss of anonymity, she finds it important to provide a retreat into a private world for both of them as well."

Nane Annan enjoys cross-country ski-ing, hiking and canoeing as well as tennis.

The Annans have three children from previous marriages, Ama, Nine and Kojo.