Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong was born on 14 November 1944, She is a British author and commentator of Irish Catholic descent known for her books on comparative religion.

She was born at Wildmoor, Worcestershire, into a family of Irish ancestry who, after her birth, moved to Bromsgrove and later to Birmingham. In 1962, at the age of 17, she became a member of the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a teaching congregation, in which she remained for seven years.

In 1976, Armstrong took a job teaching English at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich while working on a memoir of her convent experiences. Armstrong was honored by the New York Open Center in 2004 for her “profound understanding of religious traditions and their relation to the divine. In 2017 Armstrong was bestowed the Princess of Asturias award in recognition of her investigations into world religions