British-Ukrainian writer Marina Lewycka has posthumously been named the winner of the Vintage Bollinger prize, a winner-of-winners award marking the 25th anniversary of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. The decision to award her the prize was made the day before she died, aged 79, last month following a long illness, said judging chair Peter Florence.
The author won the award for her 2005 novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a family drama described by Vintage Bollinger judge Claudia Winkleman as “laugh out loud funny, utterly original and also deeply moving”. At the time of publication, the book was longlisted for the Man Booker prize and shortlisted for the Orange prize, now the Women’s prize for fiction.
