After a glamorous, peripatetic life – as son of Anthony Steel and Patricia Roc, two famous British film stars of the 1940s and 1950s, and as fashion photographer in Cape Town, London and Madrid – Michael Roc Thomas moved to an idyllic location in Sri Lanka in 2002. It was there that his daughter Steele was born in 2006, extremely premature and suffering from retinopathy of prematurity, a condition that almost always leads to total blindness. The fear that Steele might never see led Michael to change path and start writing silly songs and nursery rhymes to stimulate her other senses.
Over the next ten years, Michael’s writing skills progressed until in January 2018, he launched his book Seeing Better Now, a collection of 56 tales told in verse, each illustrated by two local Sri Lankan artists, at the Galle Literary Festival on the island.
Copies of Seeing Better Now will be available at the talk. The proceeds of the book are going to a Sri Lankan charity, NEST, that cares for children with severe disabilities across the island, where public funding is minimal or non-existent.
