A leading Scots author has spoken of her onset of blindness and the difficulties she faced as her sight deteriorated. Candia McWilliam, 52, started to struggle with her sight in 2006, the same year she sat on the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize.

A leading Scots author has spoken of her onset of blindness and the difficulties she faced as her sight deteriorated.

Candia McWilliam, 52, started to struggle with her sight in 2006, the same year she sat on the judging panel for the Man Booker Prize - a task that involved reading at least one novel a day.

The Edinburgh-born author of A Little Stranger and Debatable Land, for which she won the Guardian Fiction Prize, told the Scottish Review of Books about the challenges whcih she experienced as it became difficult to see.

"I reread, with increasing physical difficulty and consciously focused mental attacks, each book on the longlist and the shortlist for the Man Booker Prize between four and eight times. The GP referred me to an ophthalmologist who said that I read too much and gave me drops," she said.

She spoke of not being able to open her eyes against the photographer's flashbulbs at the longlist meeting of judges in London and the "understandable anxiety" of the prize's PR people at her diminishing sight.

Her diagnosis came from her neurologist neighbour in Oxford, who one day saw the author reach to open her eyes with her fingers.

The author is a sufferer of blepharospasm and is classed as "functionally blind", where her eyeballs are undamaged but a brain function won't allow her eye lids to open.

McWilliam said: "Seeing has always, to perhaps extreme extent, been my sense of choice. I couldn't ever see or read enough. Well, I thought my eyes have brought me so much pleasure - maybe its payback? A cheap thought and I fear some sort of Scots thought too."

McWilliam now lives in London where she is close to the doctors who treat her.

She spoke of the "fluctuating dark" which surrounds her and her white stick which helps her to navigate.

"I'm always lost, continually banging into things, but ever aware of the presence of those and that which I love and seek," she said.