Award-winning author whose novels, including her debut, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, united comic skills with serious themes

Marina Lewycka, who has died aged 79 from a degenerative brain condition, appeared to achieve a kind of fairy-tale transformation when, in her late 50s, her comic debut novel became a million-copy bestseller.

However, behind the literary stardust that settled on the British Ukrainian novelist after A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian lay not just “a long career as an unpublished author”. That book grew from intimate involvement with the sorrow and pity of war-torn Europe: a “measureless ocean of tears and blood”.