Thomas Merton was born in France on 31 January 1915 to an American mother and a New Zealand father. As a baby he was taken to New York where his mother died when he was six years old. He returned to France in August 1925 with his father and in May 1928 they migrated to England where Thomas successfully completed his schooling. His father died in London in January 1931 and in 1934 Thomas returned to New York after an unsuccessful year at Clare College, Cambridge. He received his MA in English in February 1939 from Columbia University.  On 10 December 1941 he joined the Trappists (Order of Cistercian of the Strict Observance) in Kentucky, a rather strict order of monks of the Catholic Church, where he lived for twenty-seven years until he was tragically electrocuted in Bangkok, Thailand, on 10 December 1968.

Now, over 40 years after his death, Thomas Merton's words are as significant and moving as they were when they were written. What a writer and thinker he was! Some fifty books, four thousand letters to a thousand correspondents, volumes of poetry totalling over a thousand pages, numerous essays, journals, notebooks and lectures on tape. A man well ahead of his time, a prophet of the twentieth century whose message is timeless because it is based on an acute awareness of the sacredness of all creation, and the interconnectedness of individuals regardless of religion, race and nationality.

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