Rani Manicka

Rani Manicka was born and educated in Malaysia. She divides her time between Malaysia and the UK. Her first novel, “The Rice Mother,” won the South East Asia and South Pacific Region 2003 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, has been translated into 17 languages and gained international acclaim.

An economics graduate, Rani used to be a management trainee and after that had her stint in the restaurant trade; ‘a rather awful place where absolutely everyone will try to rip you off’ in her opinion before she began writing books. She reads Mario Puzo, Margaret Atwood, Anita Brookner, Anne Tyler, Martin Amis, and very recently Sarah Hall.

Rani is inspired by her grandmother. She believes that if she lived in our time, she would probably be running a Fortune 500 company. Rain’s mother is the core inspiration for whom she says that 'My library was in my mother's head.' The dinnertime stories of her mother are the backbones of the stories of her novels. Her religious belief reflects her inner simplicity as well as the complexities of the characters that she portrays so deftly in her novels. She says that she is a hindu because her father is a hindu but she could very well be a muslim or a christian or bahai for that matter because she believes that there's just one God.

About the characters in her novels she says that ‘All my characters are flawed often terribly so but I forgive them.’ Rani is a very modest person who doesn’t claim to be any better than everyone else. She is the kind of author who warns us of the darkness within her stories before reading them. And yes we find darkness but it also has the hidden shine that uplifts the humanity. Her novels are:

·               The Rice Mother (2002)


·               Touching Earth (2004)


·               The Japanese Lover (2010) coming soon

There is very little material available on the web about her, so if you know more please write to us. Many Thanks.