Lewycka was born in 1947 in a British refugee camp in Germany and came to England as a child, where her family settled in South Yorkshire. For many years she taught media studies at the University of Sheffield before becoming a full-time author in 2012 and publishing five more books, the latest from 2020.
It was during a writing course that she developed her debut script, a novel that was sold to over 35 countries and was awarded several prestigious awards, including the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Literature.
Her agent Bill Hamilton told the BBC that Lewycka was “a writer with a unique comedic tone and a strong sense of social justice.” Lewycka suffered from a degenerative brain disease in her final years. She was 79.
