Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My 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, and she spends her days in

silence speaking only once 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 other guest to be perfectly cut out for a

stretch alone on a desert island. She says it is my apostolic duty to talk about art. If you

don't know about God, art is the only thing that can set you free.

So welcome, sister Wendy.

Your caravan, as I say, is situated in the depths of this rather beautiful looking peaceful

wood. On a day like this, of this what occurs to you? That there are so many people in the world who are searching.

They may not know what they're searching for,

but you can see in so many faces a look of wanting and so I always start immediately

to pray that they'll find it.

...