Another alternative:
Use the code from the unicodecsv package ...
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/unicodecsv/
>>> import unicodecsv as csv
>>> from io import BytesIO
>>> f = BytesIO()
>>> w = csv.writer(f, encoding='utf-8')
>>> _ = w.writerow((u'é', u'ñ'))
>>> _ = f.seek(0)
>>> r = csv.reader(f, encoding='utf-8')
>>> next(r) == [u'é', u'ñ']
True
This module is API compatible with the STDLIB csv module.