Catherine Coldstream

Catherine Coldstream grew up in London and converted to Catholicism in her early twenties. She was a Carmelite nun for twelve years. Since leaving the monastery, she took an undergraduate degree as a mature student, at the University of Oxford, and taught theology, philosophy and ethics for ten years. She has never stopped thinking about her life as a nun and wrote about it as a way of understanding the experiences that shaped her. In her striking memoir Cloistered, she describes life as a contemplative nun in the 1990s, and the dramatic events which led to her flight from the monastery on the brink of the Millennium.