British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka was born in 1946 in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany to Ukrainian parents, and moved to England with her family when she was a year old

The author of six novels, Lewycka’s first book, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published in 2005, sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction and the Waverton Good Read Award. Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. 

Lewycka died on 11 November 2025, aged 79.

Marina Lewycka

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