Novelist's bed is her office

High above Wanganui an English writer of Ukrainian descent may be sitting up in bed and writing her second novel at this very moment.
Marina Lewycka likes to write in bed, with her laptop balanced on a beanbag table she bought from the city's Salvation Army second-hand shop. Her St John's Hill house has a high bedroom with four windows and great views.
She can spend up to eight hours a day on her writing, producing and fine-tuning 1500 words. She's not sure where the novel is going, but is enjoying its unexpectedness. She's in Wanganui because her husband, employment consultant Dave Feickert, is from the city. The two have bought a house in St John's Hill and plan to spend part of each year there and part in Sheffield, Yorkshire.
Being away from Europe is giving Ms Lewycka more time to write.
"In England they work you terribly hard. They would have you doing two or three readings a week if they could."
She had always wanted to be a fiction writer and had written two unpublished novels. Her third, successful, effort was pulled together after doing a creative writing course. It's funny, and made her the first woman to win the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction.
It is called A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. It's about a widower in his 80s who falls in love with a glamorous blonde Ukrainian divorcee set on enjoying all the privileges of British life.
The old man has two daughters who have been fighting all their lives but unite against the intruder into their family. The book also has lashings of 20th century Ukrainian history ? which is where the tractors come in.
The book is semi-autobiographical, Ms Lewycka said. She does really have a father, now elderly, who was once a tractor engineer.
She was born in a refugee camp in Germany. "It's part of who I am, but I didn't know much about it because my parents didn't tell me. Then, before my mother died, she started to talk to my husband. He asked questions, and they started to tell him."
Later she typed her mother's maiden name into an internet site and got in touch with her Ukrainian relatives.
"It took six months to get a reply, and then I got three replies. I couldn't believe they were real."
The result was a visit to the Ukrainian village where her family were turned off their land because they refused to make it part of a collective farm. She met her Ukrainian relatives.
"They were like me, but what was sad was that they were terribly poor."
New Zealand felt far away from the strife of Russian borderland history, which she had to dwell on for the novel. But she said Godzone was similar in some ways to Ukraine ? a peaceful, no-nonsense farming country.
Ms Lewycka has also written several books about caring for elderly people, and is a part-time lecturer on journalism and public relations at Sheffield Hallam University. Her current book is called Two Caravans.
n Marina Lewycka reads from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and answers questions from 5.30 to 7pm tomorrow at Wanganui's Alexander Library, in Queen's Park. And she hopes to have a vintage Massey Harris tractor there.
Tickets cost $5 and can be bought at the Davis Library. Drinks and nibbles will be served.