Cate Haste

Catherine "Cate" Haste (born 6 August 1945) is an English author, biographer, historian and documentary film director,whoworked freelance for the major television networks in the UK and US over a career spanning 40 years.

Haste has directed political and historical documentaries and series including Munich: The Peace of Paper.. For Cold War, Jeremy Isaacs 24-part series, Haste directed five films. She directedFlashback TV’s Hitler’s Bridesabout women in Nazi Germany; produced Death of a Democrat in Channel 4’s Secret Historyseries , and Married to the Prime Minister,presented by Cherie Blair, the wife of the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

Haste’s first book Keep the Home Fires Burning (1977), was described by journalist Phillip Knightley as: "One can only hope that this important book will make it more difficult for any British government so deeply to deceive its people ever again." Maureen Freely wrote that Rules of Desire, (1997) was "as diverting and as suggestive as a very good novel.... temperate, balanced, subtle and humane." The Daily Telegraph critic wrote that Nazi Women: Hitler’s Seduction of a Nation (2001) "opens up the bizarre moral universe of the Third Reich ....at once comprehensible and compelling, and at times deeply moving. It is media history at its best." The prize-winning Sheila Fell: A Passion for Paint (2010), a biography/monograph of the Cumbrian Expressionist landscape painter, signaled Haste’s shift to biography and was "a handsome, slim volume ....elegantly and deftly put together." according toAndrew Lambirth.

Haste is one of three surviving daughters of Eric and Margaret Haste. She was married from 1973 to 2018 to Melvyn Bragg; the couple had two children. She is a member of English PEN, BAFTA, The Writer’s Guild of Great Britain and Directors UK (formerly Directors Guild of Great Britain), and has been a trustee of Index on Censorship and World Film Collective.