'Funny, warm, eccentric': tributes as author Marina Lewycka dies at 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.

- Emma Loffhagen

Lewycka's fiction often drew on her Ukrainian heritage and her family's experiences as refugees. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, which was 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 Booker prize and shortlisted for the Women's 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.