Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, after World War II, and now lives in Sheffield, Yorkshire. Her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005) was published when she was 58 years old, and went on to sell a million copies in thirty five languages. It was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, won the 2005 Saga Award for Wit and the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Her second novel Two Caravans (2007) (published in US as Strawberry Fields) was short-listed for the George Orwell prize for political writing. We Are All Made of Glue was published in 2009, and touches on the property boom in London, the conflict in the Middle East, epilepsy, cats, bondage, and glue. Her fourth novel Various Pets Alive and Dead, published in 2012, is the story of a family who lived in a commune in the seventies, whose children have grown up with different aspirations: one has become a banker, one is a schoolteacher, and the youngest daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, just wants a place of her own. Her novel The Lubetkin Legacy was published in May 2016.