Not strictly a Sheffielder, but somebody who chose to settle in the city. She is Marina Lewycka, British novelist of Ukrainian descent.
She is the author of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), a million-seller, Two Caravans (2007), We Are All Made of Glue (2009), Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012), The Lubetkin Legacy (2016) and the soon-to-be-published The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid (2020).
Lewycka was born in 1946 at a displaced persons camp in Schleswig Holstein in Germany. Her family subsequently moved to England, where she attended Gainsborough High School for Girls and Witney Grammar School, Oxfordshire, later graduating from Keele University and the University of York.
In 1985, Lewycka moved to Sheffield with her husband, who worked for the National Union of Mineworkers. She became a teacher and afterwards a lecturer of Media Studies at Sheffield Hallam University, retiring in 2011.
She now splits her time between Sheffield and London and is aware of the north-south divide. “When I get off a train (in Sheffield) you can just see how poor everybody is.”
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