Visually impaired author Gladys Smit publishes fifth book ‘A Gift of Love’
FINISHING five books is a feat for anyone, let alone Gladys Smit who is 94 and a “touch blind”. The Croydon Park author started writing in 1999, after she suddenly lost sight in one eye.
The Express
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FINISHING five books is a feat for anyone, let alone Gladys Smit who is 94 and a “touch blind”.
The visually-impaired Croydon Park author started writing in 1999, after she suddenly lost sight in one eye.
She has just published her fifth book, A Gift of Love.
“I have a lot of memories so I wrote and kept writing. Paragraphs turned into chapters and they turned into books,” Mrs Smit said.
Her books, all published by Amazon, have been written with the help of Jaws — a computer program that allows her to dictate her novels.
They each detail Mrs Smit’s remarkable life, which started in Singapore.
Mrs Smit married Singapore’s “Perry Como”, Leslie Rozario, and her life spanned three continents and six children.
She moved to Sydney in 1975 to be with her third husband, Hans Smit, and to run 10 bus companies across Australia.
At 77, and just one year after her retirement, Mrs Smit lost vision in her right eye.
She wrote up until 2015 when Hans died.
“Every time I sat down at the computer I could not write,” she said.
“(Eventually) Amid my tears and my happiness and sadness I wrote the book.”
Her fifth book A Gift of Love is dedicated to Hans.
Mrs Smit also chairs the Seniors Visually Impaired Persons peer support group in Canterbury-Bankstown and co-ordinates bread donations for the poor.
Her mantra?
“It’s not what you have lost in life that counts, but what you do with what you have left,” she said.
“Being visually impaired should not deter us from moving on — we should move on regardless.”
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