Graduation 2010: Honorary Degree Profile – Marina Lewycka
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Author Marina Lewycka has been awarded an honorary degree from Leeds Metropolitan University.
Ms Lewycka was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature on 20 July.
Her first novel, The Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), tells of the exploits of two feuding sisters trying to save their elderly father from a Ukrainian divorcee, Valentina. This book won the 2005 Saga Award for Wit, the 2005 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize for Fiction, long listed for the Booker prize, and went on to sell more than a million copies. Her second novel Two Caravans was published in 2007, and her third novel We Are All Made of Glue came out in 2009.
Ms Lewycka is of Ukraine origin and was born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, in 1946. She studied at Keele University, and has written a number of books of practical advice for carers of the elderly, published by Age Concern. She is currently a lecturer in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University.
She said: “I’m delighted and honoured to receive this award. My academic career suffered because I was always sneaking off to write novels when I should have been working on academic papers, so it’s nice to get there in the end.”
Leeds Metropolitan’s week-long graduation celebrations saw over 3,000 celebrating their achievements at the graduation Village at the University’s Headingley Campus. Ms Lewycka received an honorary doctorate in literature alongside students from the Faculty of Health on 20 July.
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