Marina Lewka was posthumously named ‘Winner of the Winners’ of the Woodhouse Prize for Comic Fiction | books

British-Ukrainian author Marina Loyka has been posthumously selected to win the Vintage Bollinger Prize, the winners’ award marking the 25th anniversary of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. Jury Chairman Peter Florence said that the decision to award her the award was made the day before her death at the age of 79 last month after a long struggle with illness.

The author won the prize for her 2005 novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, a family drama that Vintage Bollinger judge Claudia Winkelmann described as “laugh-out-loud funny, wholly original and also deeply moving”. At the time of publication, the book was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orange Prize, now the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Loyka’s partner, Donald Sassoon, and his daughter, Sonia Loyka, received the award on behalf of the writer at a ceremony held in Westminster on Monday evening.

The event also saw Rosanna Pike receive the 2025 Prize for her novel A Little Trickerie, for which she won a pig named after her book, Jeroboam and the Bollinger Special Cuvée, and the complete set of the Everyman’s PG Wodehouse Library collection.

The novel, which The Guardian critic Imogen Hermes Goar described as “endearing, entertaining and emotionally moving,” is based on a real woman: Elizabeth, the “Holy Maid of Leominster” at Hereford, who supposedly appeared as an angel in the abbey there but turned out to be an impostor. Pike imagines Elizabeth “with great skill: the white-haired teenager Tip Ingleby is frankly and unabashedly herself from the first page, dancing and shouting with her mother ‘with a great shout,’” wrote Hermes Guar.

Lewycka and Pike’s novels are published by Fig Tree, an imprint of Penguin, in the United Kingdom.

Lewycka was named the winner from an illustrious alumni list that includes Jonathan Coe, Geoff Dyer, Ian McEwan, Terry Pratchett, Helen Fielding, Alexander MacColl Smith, Percival Everett and Bob Mortimer among others.

Hay Festival co-founder Florence said that while it seemed “challenging” to “crown one book out of many as the funniest book of the last 25 years,” the judges “came up with a book that some people were discovering for the first time and were laughing out loud at and loving.” [Lewycka] She has us in the title, and she rocks us on every page. It is a book reshaped 20 years after its first publication, through the history of Ukraine and the story of the refugee experience in the UK. The comedy is somehow darker and more colorful.

He added that Loika died “the day after the jury met to determine the winner of the award.” “I’m so happy she knew she won.”

Along with Winkleman and Florence, the Vintage Bollinger judging panel included The Great British Sewing Bee judge Patrick Grant, as well as comedians Tatty Macleod and Sindhu Vee. Meanwhile, the 2025 award was judged by comedian Pippa Evans, novelist Stephanie Merritt, broadcaster James Naughtie, University of Wales Vice-Chancellor Justin Albert, Everyman Bookshop publisher David Campbell, and Florence.