Marina Lewycka was born on 12 October 1946 in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, and died on 11 November 2025 in London, aged 79. A Ukrainian-British novelist and lecturer, she spent the most productive decades of her life in Sheffield, where she lectured in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University and eventually wrote the debut novel that changed her life. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published in 2005 when she was 58 years old, was translated into more than 30 languages and sold over a million copies in the UK alone. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, the Saga Award for Wit and the Waverton Good Read Award, and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

The novel had been rejected 36 times before publication. It was the result of a creative writing course at Sheffield Hallam, where her fellow students’ laughter told her she was onto something. Over the following two decades, she published six novels in total. In her final years she lived with a degenerative brain condition. She is survived by her partner Donald Sassoon and her daughter Sonia.

Marina Lewycka – Quick Facts

Origins: A Refugee Camp in Germany

Marina Lewycka’s story begins in one of the most turbulent periods of European history. Her parents were Ukrainian civilians who had been taken to Germany as forced labourers by the Nazis during the Second World War — a fate shared by millions of people from occupied Eastern Europe. When the war ended, they were among the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons living in camps across Germany, unable or unwilling to return to a Ukraine now under Soviet rule.

Marina was born in a British-run displaced persons camp in Kiel in October 1946. Her family moved to England shortly after, settling in the UK as the postwar period brought a measure of stability. She grew up in Britain, educated at Keele University in Staffordshire and later at the University of York, and made her professional career in the country that had taken her family in. The Ukrainian heritage, however, never left her — it ran through her family’s stories, her sense of humour, and eventually through her fiction.

Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University

In 1986, Lewycka’s family relocated to Sheffield. The city became her home for the better part of three decades. She joined Sheffield Hallam University as a lecturer in media studies, a role she held until 2012. Sheffield Hallam, one of the UK’s largest universities with its main campus on the edge of the city centre, gave her a stable academic base while her writing developed.

An early anecdote captures her relationship with Sheffield precisely. In a 2017 interview, she described going shopping at Meadowhall — Sheffield’s major shopping centre — with her mother, who was visiting their new home. After hours walking around, her mother said: ‘Marina, let’s sit down and have a cup of tea. I’m not as young as I used to be.’ It was a small moment, but Lewycka said it was the first time she had seen her mother as an old woman, and it planted the seed of thinking about ageing, family and Ukrainian stories that would eventually become A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

The Creative Writing Course That Started Everything

Lewycka had been working on the novel that would become A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian for the best part of a decade when she enrolled in a creative writing course at Sheffield Hallam University — the institution where she herself taught. The course was decisive. She read her early draft to a group of about fifteen fellow students, and their response was immediate and physical: they were splitting their sides with laughter.

The external examiner for the course was also a literary agent. He approached her at the end and asked whether she wanted representation. She did. The novel went on to be rejected 36 times before being picked up — but the course had given her both the impetus to take the work seriously and the contact that eventually led to publication. In a 2016 interview with BBC Radio Sheffield, she recalled that the course had encouraged her from the very first day to believe she was a real writer.

A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Published in March 2005 by Viking (Penguin Books), A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian tells the story of two feuding sisters — Nadezhda and Vera — who must unite to save their elderly Ukrainian father from marrying Valentina, a buxom and opportunistic divorcee who has arrived from Ukraine with a teenage son and an ambition to acquire a British passport.

The novel is comic on its surface — Lewycka’s description of Valentina as arriving ‘like a fluffy pink grenade’ into the family became one of the book’s most-quoted images — but underneath the comedy runs something darker: the weight of wartime displacement, family secrets kept across generations, and the particular experience of Ukrainians who survived the Nazi occupation and Soviet collectivisation. The father’s obsession with tractors, used as a symbol of Soviet agricultural policy, is both absurd and historically rooted.

Critics responded warmly. The book won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction (Lewycka was the first female winner), the Saga Award for Wit and the Waverton Good Read Award. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread First Novel Award. It sold more than a million copies in the UK alone and was translated into more than 30 languages. The woman who had spent years sending it out to rejections found herself, at 58, a bestselling author.

Subsequent Novels

Later Life and Death

Lewycka retired from full-time lecturing at Sheffield Hallam in 2012 to write full-time — a decision made after the extraordinary success of her debut had demonstrated that fiction could sustain her. She continued to be associated with the university in a part-time capacity and remained a resident of Sheffield for much of this period. In addition to her novels, she had written a number of practical books for carers of elderly people, published by the charity Age Concern — a body of work that reflected both her Ukrainian family background and a genuine social conscience.

In her final years, Lewycka lived with a degenerative brain condition. She died in London on 11 November 2025, aged 79. Her literary agent Bill Hamilton described her as having a ‘unique comic sensibility’ and ‘a campaigning sense of social justice’ — a combination that defined both her novels and her public presence. She is survived by her partner Donald Sassoon and her daughter Sonia.

Legacy

Marina Lewycka arrived in Sheffield in 1986 as an academic and left it, in literary terms, as one of the most warmly received comic novelists of her generation. The city gave her the stability, the community and the creative writing course that eventually produced her first book. Sheffield Hallam University, which you can read about as part of our guide to the city’s major employers and education sector, nurtured her as both a teacher and a writer.

She was not a conventional Sheffield celebrity — not a musician, sportsperson or actor. But her story reflects something genuinely Sheffield about her trajectory: a quiet, methodical determination to do the work, a willingness to be told 36 times that it was not good enough and keep going anyway, and an eventual eruption into public life that caught everyone slightly by surprise. Sheffield produces people like that.