British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka, who "often drew on her Ukrainian heritage and her family's experiences as refugees," died November 13, the Guardian reported. She was 79. Lewycka was best known for her debut novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which "established her as a distinctive voice in contemporary British fiction."
Published in 2005, when she was 58, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian became an international bestseller and was translated into 35 languages. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 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 flavor 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, said, "It was the greatest pleasure to edit and publish Marina. 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."
Lewycka was born in 1946 in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, "the daughter of two Ukrainians who had been taken [to Germany] as forced laborers by the Nazis. Her family later moved to England, where she grew up and was educated," the Guardian wrote. She lectured in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University, where she joined a creative writing course and refined the manuscript that became A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
Her later novels include Two Caravans (2007), shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing; We Are All Made of Glue (2009); Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012); The Lubetkin Legacy (2016), which was also shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize; and her final book, The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid (2020).
In later years Lewycka, struggled with multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare, progressive neurological disorder that causes the degeneration of nerve cells in the brain. "I have come to depend on friends and the kindness of strangers.... One of the few advantages of this condition is that I get to see human beings at their best," she observed in the Guardian in 2020, adding that although she wrote more slowly, "sometimes the mistakes can open up new avenues of creative thought.... It keeps me smiling when there's not much else to smile about."