Hi. It’s nice to meet you, I’m Jeevani, but you can call me Jeev. Everyone does.
I write women’s fiction, usually featuring heroines of colour. I also write contemporary romances with a hint of British cynicism under the pen name Rhoda Baxter. So why the two names? Well… I’m British Sri-Lankan and the first book I wrote was about a bunch of middle class Sri Lankan people. I couldn’t find a home for it (even though I got some very nice rejection notes). The next book I wrote was a rom com with white main characters in it. That found a publisher within a year. I chose to use a pen name for those books, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that my real name is difficult to spell and difficult to pronounce and marks me out as non-white. My fifth book also had Sri Lankan main characters. That too, proved hard to place.
So when I finally got a publication deal for a book with a Sri Lankan heroine. So it seemed only right for that book to be under my difficult to spell, difficult to pronounce name.
For the record, it’s pronounced Jeev-uh-nee.
There’s a whole lot of other stuff I could tell you – but mainly, I’m a former scientist, a fan of Lego, an embarrassing mum, a part time geek (see ’embarrassing mum’) and a very short person.
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Want to get in touch? Just drop me a line here.
Or, try tweeting me on @rhodabaxter (I’m more active on Twitter than on Facebook).
Jeevani Charika 