Marina Lewycka: ‘Finding something funny in the bedroom tax was a challenge’

The bestselling author on dark humour, struggling to write villains and why she can’t wait to be old and bolshie

“At the moment the big fashion is for crime and horror,” comic novelist Marina Lewycka tells me over coffee and pastries, “but when I go to the pictures and it’s something scary, I can hardly watch. I like to be cheered up by things, and it’s not because I think the world is OK, it’s because I think the world is so awful.”

Had someone set about imagining what sort of English novelist the daughter of Ukrainian refugees, born in a British-run camp in Germany in 1946, might turn out to be, it is unlikely they would have guessed right: when we think of writers from the former Soviet Union, we are far more likely to think of angst than jokes. But over the course of five novels, starting when A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian became a wildly unlikely smash hit just over a decade ago, Lewycka has made a name for herself in the world of comic fiction. She won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2005 (the prize is a Gloucestershire Old Spots pig); the only woman to have won in all its 16 years.

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