Marina Lewycka

Marina Lewycka was born of Ukrainian parents in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the war, and grew up in England. She teaches at Sheffield Hallam University. She is married, with a grown-up daughter, and lives in Sheffield.

'A remarkable first novel - funny, moving and most ingenious, with a memorable cast of characters' Penelope Lively

Interview with the author

More about A Short History of Tractors in the Ukrainian: 

'Two years after my mother died, my father fell in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee. He was eighty-four and she was thirty-six. She exploded into our lives like a fluffy pink grenade, churning up the murky water, bringing to the surface a sludge of sloughed-off memories, giving the family ghosts a kick up the backside.'

When their recently widowed father announces he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda realize they must put aside a litetime of feuding in order to save him. His new love is a voluptuous gold-digger from the Ukraine half his age, with a proclivity for green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine; who stops at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of the luxurious Western lifestyle she dreams of. But the old man, too, is pursuing his eccentric dreams - and writing a history of tractors in Ukrainian.

A wise, tender and deeply funny novel about families, the healing of old wounds, the trials and consolations of old age and - really - about the legacy of Europe's history over the last fifty years.

What inspired you to write in the first place?

I’ve always enjoyed playing around with words, the way other children play with plasticine or paint or dressing up, and I’ve been making up poems and stories since I was a child.  People tell each other stories all the time – it’s our  way of explaining and interpreting the world – and a novel is just a longer and more structured version.

I don’t think it does to be too solemn about writing. At the end of the day, it’s just a form of entertainment. However, one of the wonderful things about us human beings is that we’re not stupid – we are also entertained by history, science, philosophy, tragedy. I wanted my novel to have all these elements, but I also really wanted to get across that naughty gossipy feeling of telling a close friend an outrageous story.

What authors influenced you?

I love James Joyce’s lists, Shakespeare’s interplay between comedy and tragedy,Salman Rushdie’s way with foreign English, John Donne’s juxtaposition of love and science, Kate Atkinson’s voices, Zoe Heller’s bitchiness, Zadie Smith’s exuberance, David Mitchell’s range, Margaret Attwood’s sheer professionalism; I could go on.  In fact I can truly say that every writer I have read has influenced me in some way.

How did going to creative writing school help you?

I had been working on my novel on and off for about six years. The decision to go to writing school was also a decision to make the time and commitment to finish it. I got good advice about plot, structure, character, but above all the course made me produce a certain amount of writing every week, and to show it to other people. And once I started to receive positive feedback from my tutors and fellow students, it also gave me the confidence to persevere with something that I was afraid might be too weird and whacky to get published. Of course the other wonderful thing about writing school is that my novel was picked up by a literary agent who is an examiner on the course. 

How did you feel when you found out you were going to be published?

I have actually written two other novels – one was written out in longhand but never typed up. The other was typed up, and sent out to dozens of publishers and agents – I have a huge pile of rejection slips in my drawer to prove it. I have to say that the feeling of rejection, when you have put years of your life into something, is so intense, that you have to be both brave and mad to do it again. So being published was amazing – it was like a door opening into a magic room – a room outside of  which I had stood for years, pressing my nose against the window, wondering how I was going to get in.

The characters in A Short History of Tractors in the Ukrainian are brilliantly imagined and full of life - were they inspired by anyone and do you identify with any of them yourself?

Well they say that you should write about what you know, and of course all the characters in the book are people I know, but usually they are composites, amalgams of different people, with a fair amount of invention and exaggeration mixed in. Tthe strange thing is that as you start writing the characters really do take on a life of their own, and you can’t completely control them anymore.

You've managed to make a terrifically funny novel out of what can be quite serious subjects...what was it that drove you to write about such themes?

The immigrant experience is my own experience. I always enjoy reading novels about people from different ethnic groups and how they experience life in England.  I was struck by the fact that although Ukrainians have lived in England in quite large numbers since the war, they are largely invisible. The intense and slightly mad life of the Ukrainian community is simply unknown to most people, and though everybody knows one or two Ukrainians, they have no idea why we came to England, how we got here, and what goes on behind the closed doors of the Ukrainian Clubs dotted around the country.

Eastern European humour is often very dark – it is the humour of people used to coping with terrible circumstances, escaping by a hair’s breadth from tragedy, mocking the powerful because there is absolutely nothing else they can do about the abuses of power,  laughing because the only alternative to laughter is depression and alcoholism – and there is plenty of that in Ukraine too. 

Where did the tractor theme come from?

I have my father to thank for that. He was indeed  writing a history of tractors, though his version was more to do with mechanical developments, whereas I thought it would be interesting to look at what tractors tell us about history, society and ourselves.

Having made this decision, I felt quite daunted at the thought of ploughing through rows of tractor books, but the internet came to my rescue. I found that out there in cyberspace there are thousands of historic tractor enthusiasts, whole communities of them, eager to post information about their beloved machines. Of course by the end of the book, I was a committed tractor enthusiast too.

Please could you recommend two paperbacks for our readers?

Not on the Label: What really goes into the food on your plate by Felicity Lawrence. This fascinating account of the food we eat every day  reads like a thriller that is by turns frightening, shocking, funny, tragic, and always completely gripping. 

Be warned, it may put you off eating virtually everything!

Carol Ann Duffy's Selected Poems. Each poem is like a small crystallized novel, taking you under the surface of everyday life into a world that is intense, beautiful, puzzling, and brings you up short with a shock of self-recognition.