Marina Lewycka, British-Ukrainian author, dies aged 79

"The British-Ukrainian novelist Marina Lewycka, best known for her comic debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has died aged 79 from a degenerative brain condition, her agent has confirmed. Lewycka's fiction often drew on her Ukrainian heritage and her family's experiences as refugees. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published in 2005 when she was 58, became an unexpected international bestseller and was translated into 35 languages."

"It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing, was longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Orange prize for fiction. Marina burst on the scene with her memorable and bestselling first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, said her agent, Bill Hamilton. It introduced her unique comic sensibility, with a strong flavour of farce, matched with a campaigning sense of social justice, which played out magnificently over subsequent novels and in her public life."

"Juliet Annan, her former editor, also paid tribute to the author. It was the greatest pleasure to edit and publish Marina, Annan said. There are very few true originals around and she was one of them funny, warm, eccentric, political in the best way imaginable, impossible and wonderful. Her crusading fiction will live on as an extraordinarily serious and hilarious record of times and places."

Marina Lewycka was a British-Ukrainian novelist whose fiction drew on Ukrainian heritage and her family's refugee experiences. She was born in 1946 in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, to Ukrainian parents taken as forced labourers by the Nazis, and later grew up and was educated in England. She lectured in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University and refined her manuscript for A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian on a creative writing course. Published in 2005 when she was 58, the novel became an international bestseller translated into 35 languages and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize; it was also longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Orange prize. Lewycka's work combined comic sensibility, farce, and social justice themes, and she died aged 79 from a degenerative brain condition.

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