Marina Lewycka Meet the Author

the website this afternoon. We will have plenty more for you, a full

round-up, in Sports day at 6:30pm. Now it is time for Meet The Author.

Marina Lewycka became a literary star at the age of 58

with her first novel, a Short History of

It was a critical and commercial success, winning prizes

She's the daughter of two Ukrainians, who had been taken

to Germany as forced labourers by the Nazis.

She was born in a refugee camp before her family

Marina Lewycka's new novel, which is her fifth, is set

on a housing estate in North London, and it's called The Lubetkin Legacy.

Marina, let's start with the title of the book, The Lubetkin Legacy.

Now, Berthold Lubetkin was a real person.

Well, he inspired me in the sense that I spent a lot of time

walking around in London, and you could see all the cranes

and the building works, and the whole of London seems

as though it's being rebuilt, but if you look behind that

and beyond that, you see the traces, the legacy of a different

You see a lot of social housing, and a lot of the best social

housing in London was built by Berthold Lubetkin, and also very

close to where I sit, the very beautiful Finsbury Health Centre,

I started to think about, what's happened here?

And then a story popped into my head.

The book is set on a fictional housing estate in North

And the story alternates between a middle-aged man called

Berthold, who is a failed actor and lives with his mother

and a beautiful young woman called Violet, who is

Why did you decide to structure the novel in that way?

Well, because - in a way because people's lives are so often

in parallel and close to people and very seldom and just

occasionally intersect, as these two do, sometimes

intersect, and I suppose it's partly the great variety of people that

lives in London and especially on council estates nowadays and how

They have their own destinies and life paths, and they're looking

for completely different things, but there's just a point

Well, we won't give anything else away, but part of the theme,

I suppose, of the book is the pitfalls of life in modern

Britain, and boy, are there some pitfalls,

You've already touched on social housing.

You also write about the so-called bedroom tax, disability allowance,

corruption in Kenya, offshore wealth management.

You seem quite angry with the world today.

Well, I am angry, but I hope it doesn't come across as a very angry

book because really when I look around the world,

Then I think the only way people are going to survive this is I can

cheer them up a bit, so I take something which is really

very dreadful, like the bedroom tax, and I hope I can

It's not an angry book, and people who have read your previous books

will recognise what you do, which is to write about sometimes

quite desperate circumstances but in a very comic way.

I suspect that's quite a difficult trick to pull

If you're used to thinking about things in a comic way,

you look at a situation and you think, well,

And invariably there is one, surprisingly sometimes.

I've read that you thought at one point you'd never get

Partly because it has these two separate trajectories,

and at the end, you do have to pull everything together.

You have to bring things to a conclusion, and in a way,

because the issues and the stories are ongoing and in real

life are not resolved, nevertheless you need to bring them

You have to resolve them for the characters if not

I'm also interested - why did you set it in London?

Because you don't live in London, do you?

Yes, but I spent a lot of time in London, and I think in a way

all of the same things are happening in all of our cities.

You can see the public spaces are being stripped off and sold off

and things which were once in the public domain

are being privatised, and new housing is going up that

people can't afford, and it's happening everywhere,

but it's happening particularly in London.

It's as though London's foreshadowing what's happening

Now, your first novel, A Short History of Tractors

in Ukrainian was rejected 36 times - Yes.

- before you finally found a publisher, as I said,

You know, I love writing, and I think

I just - you - sometimes in real life, you don't have a lot

of control over what's going on in your life,

When you're writing, you're in control.

The characters do what you want them to do, within limits.

You can't actually force characters to do things that are out

of character, but somehow you're in charge, and it's really

Had dreadful things happened to you, then?

Well, not as dreadful as all that, but sort of work and -

I didn't have a fantastic career outside of writing, and you know,

just things like parking tickets or annoyances or whatever, but in -

when you write about those things, you can turn them into a comedy.

You can make them tolerable for you,

When you achieve such phenomenal success with your first novel,

is that only a blessing, or are there any drawbacks

Well, there are drawbacks, because people have expectations,

and people often say to you, "I love your book."

But it's nice now that sometimes people say,

And so - whereas a lot of people who only read The Tractors hadn't

come back to read my previous books, I always hope that they will.

The truth is without Tractors, nobody would have heard

I suppose there's - when you're writing your

first novel, there's no pressure, is there?

You're under no contractual obligation.

I don't know whether you can ever do that again.

That's right, because afterwards, there are always expectations,

and there's always the idea that, you know, as my lovely

publisher said, "We want you to be exactly the same

One thing that did strike me about this novel is there are far

fewer Ukrainian characters in it than in your previous books.

Well, there's one high-profile Ukrainian character in it,

but I - so many awful things have happened in the Ukraine that

That is something that makes me quite angry,

and I feel I have to distance myself from it, really.

I don't think I could - I think it's something I couldn't

write about with a light touch as much maybe as I would

like to treat other topics, so I have backed off a little bit.

Because you wrote A Brief History of Tractors in 2005.

As you say, an enormous amount has happened in the Ukraine

Are the events there ever anything you think you could address directly

Well, it wouldn't be a funny novel, and it wouldn't be the events that -

I would like to write more about Ukraine because Ukraine

is a country that lends itself to fiction, and if I dare say so,

But the present state of the country is not one that you could write

Talking to you, I'm beginning to sense that you'd quite

Well, I think - what I try and do is write funny books

I think I'd be useless writing a book that was really serious.

Marina Lewycka, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us