Marina Lewycka posthumously named ‘winner of winners’ of Wodehouse prize for comic fiction

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.

The novel, described as “lovable, fun and emotionally juicy” by critic Imogen Hermes Gowar in the Guardian, was inspired by a real-life woman: Elizabeth, the “Holy Maid of Leominster,” in Hereford, who supposedly appeared as an angel in the priory there but was found to be a fraud. Pike imagines Elizabeth “with great panache: white-haired adolescent Tibb Ingleby is frankly and unashamedly herself from the first page, dancing and whooping with her mother ‘with a big hoot-hoot’,” wrote Hermes Gowar.

Both Lewycka and Pike’s novels are published by Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin, in the UK.

Marina Lewycka is presented with a jeroboam of Bollinger in the presence of the customary pen of Gloucester pigs, after winning the Wodehouse prize in 2005. Photograph: Justin Williams/Shutterstock

Lewycka was named the winner-of-winners from an illustrious alumni list that features Jonathan Coe, Geoff Dyer, Ian McEwan, Terry Pratchett, Helen Fielding, Alexander McCall Smith, Percival Everett and Bob Mortimer among others.

Florence, co-founder of Hay festival, said that while it seemed “daunting” to “garland one book among so many as the funniest book of the last 25 years”, the judges “came to a book that some people were discovering for the first time and were laughing aloud at and loving. [Lewycka] has us at the title, and she rocks us on every page. And it’s a book that is reshaped by the 20 years since it was first published, by both the history of Ukraine and the story of refugee experience in the UK. The comedy is somehow both darker and more vivid.”

Lewycka died “the day after the jury met to decide the prize winner,” he added. “I am so glad she knew she had won.”

Along with Winkleman and Florence, the judging panel for the Vintage Bollinger included The Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant, as well as comedians Tatty Macleod and Sindhu Vee. Meanwhile, the 2025 prize was judged by comedian Pippa Evans, novelist Stephanie Merritt, broadcaster James Naughtie, University of Wales vice chair Justin Albert, Everyman’s Library publisher David Campbell, and Florence.