British-Ukrainian author Marina Lewycka has died aged 79 at home on 11th November 2025 from a degenerative brain condition. She is survived by her partner Donald Sassoon and daughter Sonia.

Lewycka was born in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany in 1946 to two Ukrainians, who had been imprisoned there as forced labourers by the Nazis. The family subsequently moved to Sheffield, England, where Lewycka would go on to become a lecturer in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University, a role she held until she retired in March 2012.

In 2005, she won the Bollinger Everyman Prize for Comic Fiction for her debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Penguin), which was also longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and translated into 35 languages.

The novel that followed, Two Caravans, was published in March 2007 by Fig Tree and was shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing. Other books included We Are All Made of Glue (2009), Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012),The Lubetkin Legacy (2016) and The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid (2020).

In her later years, Lewycka battled multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare condition caused by a loss of nerve cells in the brain. Writing in the Guardian in 2020 of her condition, she said: “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.”

Her agent Bill Hamilton said: “Marina burst on the scene with her memorable and bestselling first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. 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.”

Lewycka’s former editor Juliet Annan added: “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.”