British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka dies

British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka, best known for her 2005 novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has died aged 79.

Lewycka, who was born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1947, moved to the UK with her family as a child and later settled in South Yorkshire.

She was a lecturer in Media Studies at Sheffield Hallam University until 2012, before pursuing her career as a writer full time and publishing a further five books, including 2020’s The Good, The Bad and The Little Bit Stupid.

Confirming her death, her agent Bill Hamilton described Lewycka as a having a “unique comic sensibility” and “a campaigning sense of social justice”.

Lewycka had been living with a degenerative brain condition in recent years and is survived by her partner, Donald Sassoon, and her daughter, Sonia.

It was while working at Sheffield Hallam that she took a creative writing course and honed her debut novel, which went on to sell more than a million copies in the UK alone and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award.

Speaking to BBC Radio Sheffield in 2016, she said the course had encouraged her to take herself seriously as a writer from the very first day.

“I had two things that I’d started on, one was the tractor book and another was a children’s book … I read them both to the group, about 15 budding writers like myself, and they were splitting their sides with the tractor book and said go with that one, and so I did.”

Mr Hamilton told The Guardian Lewycka had “burst on the scene with her memorable and bestselling first novel”.

He said: “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.”

Dr Ruth Deller, a principal lecturer in Media and Communications at Sheffield Hallam, who was tutored by Marina Lewycka in the 1990s, described her as a “very twinkly, very chatty, very sociable, funny” character, whose comedy “came through in her books”.

“They were sometimes dealing with quite serious subjects but always with quite a light, light touch, quite a comedic touch to them,” she said.

Lewycka was was born in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, in Germany in 1947.

When she first came to England as a child she said she had been a “migrant worker of sorts”, picking peas in the fields in Lincolnshire alongside her mum.

She later said that while she was in no doubt they were exploited, she loved being “out in the fresh air, under the blue sky in the Lincolnshire fields, and everybody joked and had a laugh”.