The British-Ukrainian writer, who died last month, won the prize’s 25th-anniversary Vintage Bollinger award for 2005 novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, while Rosanna Pike took this year’s prize for A Little Trickerie
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.
Lewycka’s partner, Donald Sassoon, and daughter, Sonia Lewycka, accepted the award on the writer’s behalf at a ceremony held in Westminster on Monday evening.
The event also saw Rosanna Pike take home the 2025 award for her novel A Little Trickerie, for which she wins a pig being named after her book, a jeroboam and case of Bollinger Special Cuvée, and the complete set of the Everyman’s Library PG Wodehouse collection.
