
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or


Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the nun, writer and broadcaster Sister Wendy Beckett.
For over 40 years she's lived the life of a hermit, rising every day at midnight to spend seven hours praying. Her home is a caravan in the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery where she spends her days in silence - speaking only once a day to the nun charged with delivering her daily food rations of skimmed milk, cold cooked vegetables and two rice crackers.
Her self-imposed isolation has only been broken by the - frankly rather unlikely - occurrence of a television career. She is the nun who knows about art and her passionate and pithy critiques of the world's great works and hidden treasures have won her many devoted fans.
With decades of solitude and prayer under her belt she seems, unlike nearly every other guest, to be perfectly cut out for a stretch alone on a desert island.
She says "It's my apostolic duty to talk about art. If you don't know about God, art is the only thing that can set you free".
Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.
By BBC Radio 44.7
4545 ratings
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the nun, writer and broadcaster Sister Wendy Beckett.
For over 40 years she's lived the life of a hermit, rising every day at midnight to spend seven hours praying. Her home is a caravan in the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery where she spends her days in silence - speaking only once a day to the nun charged with delivering her daily food rations of skimmed milk, cold cooked vegetables and two rice crackers.
Her self-imposed isolation has only been broken by the - frankly rather unlikely - occurrence of a television career. She is the nun who knows about art and her passionate and pithy critiques of the world's great works and hidden treasures have won her many devoted fans.
With decades of solitude and prayer under her belt she seems, unlike nearly every other guest, to be perfectly cut out for a stretch alone on a desert island.
She says "It's my apostolic duty to talk about art. If you don't know about God, art is the only thing that can set you free".
Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

7,700 Listeners

1,044 Listeners

396 Listeners

5,436 Listeners

1,794 Listeners

1,777 Listeners

1,076 Listeners

1,926 Listeners

2,064 Listeners

162 Listeners

87 Listeners

67 Listeners

53 Listeners

43 Listeners

3,191 Listeners

738 Listeners

57 Listeners

1,617 Listeners

223 Listeners

109 Listeners

617 Listeners

45 Listeners

177 Listeners

527 Listeners

28 Listeners