Seeing Better Now: Surviving and Thriving in Pardise
A talk to the Friends of Sri Lanka Association - with poetry readings and slides, and based on ten years living during a period of much upheaval including civil war, murder and mayhem, the Asian Tsunami of 2004 and a very premature baby. But also lashings of joy.
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.