Edinburgh Book Festival: Candia McWilliam's Blindness Has Happy Ending

For the final Fine Fiction writer's event at the Edinburgh Book Festival it was the award winning, Edinburgh-born and educated literary novelist Candia McWilliam. She is in conversation with Jenny Brown, the first director of the Edinburgh Book Festival.  Candia unfortunately has been through the wars in recent years: at previous Festival "meet the author" sessions she has had the opportunity to bare her soul and confess heartfelt stories about family life, guilt, alcohol and serious illness, experiences she writes about in poetry, fiction and memoir.

Two years ago, back in Edinburgh, she walked slowly onto the Book Festival stage with a white RNIB stick and revealed to a stunned audience how she had lost her sight due to a rare condition called blepherospasm. This is a case of "functional blindness" where the eyes are healthy but the brain prevents the eyelids from opening.  Accepting this disability, she calmly remarked that "If I am for the dark, I must catch the light in words."

In 2008 she wrote a diary column in the Scottish Review of Books called 'My Annulled Eyes', describing how she slowly began to go blind whilst a judge on the Man Booker Prize. The task to read hundreds of novels was a painful ordeal as she tried to keep her eyes open. This account of Candia's tragic condition was read by a woman in London who advised her to contact Alexander Foss in Nottingham, a specialist surgeon.

It was indeed a joyous occasion on 31st August 2009, to see Candia McWilliam walk onto the stage without a white stick, and to sit smiling at the audience.  We learn how she underwent surgery in January and again in June to transplant tendons from her knee to hold open her eyes; five weeks ago she was given the "blessing" to see again. She bubbles over with happiness and enthusiasm, hardly able to stop talking to describe her emotional feelings with her inimitable perfect prose and diction.

She reveals how she resolved to cope with blindness, becoming attached to Reading Books of Dickens and Joyce, and that friends read her the poetry of Don Paterson. Living in London was difficult so she moved for a while to Colonsay, the island of childhood holidays, and where she felt the return to Scotland was a kind of homecoming.

Candia then stands at the lectern where she proudly, delightedly, treats the audience to two short stores, one called Rat, based on the doctors and experience of hospital life, and another about love and marriage reflecting Baden Powell's motto Be Prepared. She has also written a Memoir about her troubled years of blindness (which she dictated but she has not yet read), due to be published next year. But of course now it needs to be revised to tell her story with its very happy ending.