Carolina Ferrer

I visited this page to mention Borges (who else would you think first!), and Carolina has already. Thanks for that, and for the info on your projects too.

There is a little Blind Novelists in English Literature Writing, but I recommend to read them as they have a unique experience.

Borges, and intermittently (on/off ocular condition) James Joyce. And Milton for poetry.

Aldous Huxley was nearly blind until he cured himself with eye exercises and wrote about the techniques developed by an ophthalmologist. His book is The Art of Seeing. Interestingly,he also wrote The Doors of Perception about hallucinogenic visions, and Heaven and Hell about visions- both titles taken from William Blake,who also experienced vision though not through drugs. See Blake's painting, the Ghost of a Flea.

Taha Hussein - "The Days"

There is Wilfred Carty of Trinidad & Tobago who wrote literary criticisms after he was blinded because he insisted on flying to Jamaica despite his doctor's advice that it will blind him, and he not only graduated from UWI Mona but also he published two books, one which is called Whispers in the Caribbean. His brother was Desmond Carty, a PNM, MP in 1986.

"How the Steel was Tempered" by Nikolai Ostrovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Steel_Was_Tempered

My suggestion is Borges. But you have to be careful because not all his productive life he was in blind condition. He became blind when he grew older.

I recommend John Fante's semi-autobiographical novel Ask the Dust (1939).

Since you do not exclude poets, there is John Milton (1608-1674) who went totally blind in 1654 and wrote all of Paradise Lost and other works while blind. I include more because I am fascinated that his views of spirit correlated to those of American Indians as to all matter and life springing from one conscious "animate substance" or energy field.

From Wikipedia (English):

Paradise Lost[edit]

Main article: Paradise Lost📷Milton Dictates the Lost Paradise to His Three Daughters, ca. 1826, by Eugène Delacroix

Milton's magnum opus, the blank-verse epic poem Paradise Lost, was composed by the blind and impoverished Milton from 1658 to 1664 (first edition), with small but significant revisions published in 1674 (second edition). As a blind poet, Milton dictated his verse to a series of aides in his employ.

**

Milton followed up the publication Paradise Lost with its sequel Paradise Regained, which was published alongside the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671. Both of these works also resonate with Milton's post-Restoration political situation. Just before his death in 1674, Milton supervised a second edition of Paradise Lost, accompanied by an explanation of "why the poem rhymes not", and prefatory verses by Andrew Marvell. In 1673, Milton republished his 1645 Poems, as well as a collection of his letters and the Latin prolusions from his Oxford days.

By the late 1650s, Milton was a proponent of monism or animist materialism, the notion that a single material substance which is "animate, self-active, and free" composes everything in the universe: from stones and trees and bodies to minds, souls, angels, and God.[50]Milton devised this position to avoid the mind-body dualism of Plato and Descartes as well as the mechanistic determinism of Hobbes. Milton's monism is most notably reflected in Paradise Lost when he has angels eat and engage in sexual intercourse (8.622–29) and the De Doctrina, where he denies the dual natures of man and argues for a theory of Creation ex Deo.

Perhaps someone here will have the patience to go through Wikipedia's list to sort out the semi-blind and one-eyed kings* from the totally blind, the novelists from the non-novalists [Hey, I love that typo so much I think I'll leave it.],** and then their to-be-recommended from their not-to-be-recommended novels:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Blind_writers

It's all a footnote to Homer. 😎

* Addendum: Apparently not everyone got the allusion. It's to Erasmus's famous remark, "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king."

** Addendum 2: I guess not everyone got the accidental allusion to Novalis either. Anyway, he was more of a poet than a novelist and although his romanticism may have blinded him to some matters of common sense, he wasn't literally blind.