Novels driven by urgency

Marina Lewycka has proved that it is never too late to become a published novelist.

"I've been a ‘successful' writer for almost five years now but I never forget that I was an unsuccessful writer for more than 50. It helps to keep things in perspective," she writes online.

Lewycka was 57 when her first novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, was accepted and 59 when it came out.

"It's nice to be starting a new career at 60!" she told Weekend Review.

The three-time novelist has been writing since she was a child and wrote her first poem at the age of 4. There has never been a time that she didn't have something — a poem, a play, a short story, a novel — on the go.

A total of 36 rejection slips later, she had almost given up hope of publishing her novel (still unpublished), when she submitted A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian as part of an MA in creative writing.

The external examiner was a literary agent who read the book and contacted her to sign her up. He then did a deal with Penguin publishers that weekend.

"I was very disappointed to hear that the advance was only £25,000 [Dh143,241]. I thought I would get a quarter of a million. ‘You have to be very young and very beautiful to get an advance like that', he said," Lewycka recalled.

Her first published work took about six years to write: The first four, she admits, she wasn't working on the project very seriously. "I just wrote bits from time to time", and when she started the MA, she really started putting in the hours.

Putting things in perspective is perhaps what her third novel, We Are All Made of Glue, does best.

Lewycka was born in 1946 in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, although she doesn't remember anything about it.

She was teased at school for having been born in Germany and also for being Russian, even though her family is Ukrainian.

Despite this, she feels lucky to have grown up in the postwar period, "which was a time of relative openness and tolerance, as people recoiled from the horrors of war and awareness of our common humanity was fostered as never before".

Her second novel, Two Caravans, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, along with Raja Shehadeh's work Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape.

Meeting, the two authors discovered they shared a passion for hill walking and Lewycka later visited Shehadeh and his wife in Ramallah, witnessing the "beautiful hill country in Palestine where Israeli settlements [colonies] have started to encroach".

The Ukrainian author had already started to write her third novel We Are All Made of Glue, which included the Arab-Israeli conflict as a theme.

Having been born in Germany at the end of the Second World War, she said she "could not but be aware of the Holocaust and the terrible suffering inflicted on the Jews of Europe. But I had very little knowledge of the origins of the state of Israel or the consequences this had for the Palestinian people who already lived there."

Visiting Ramallah showed the author the reality of the Palestinian countryside being "eaten up" by Israeli colonies and the ignominy of life behind "the wall". Her Palestinian friend also introduced her to an Arab historian, who had conducted a number of interviews with survivors of the Lydda expulsion of 1948, "many of whom perished of heat-exhaustion and dehydration during the terrible escape through the hills between Tel Aviv and Ramallah. This expulsion forms the basis of one of the episodes in my novel," she said.

For Lewycka, each of her stories is about how people adapt to the times they live in, and it is the interplay between the personal and the social or political that fascinates her.

Driving her to continue writing each day is a sense of urgency, of time running out: "So many things I want to say, stories to tell, techniques and ideas to experiment with, even to make mistakes and learn from them, and so few not-completely gaga years left in which to do it all!"

Marina Lewycka will be appearing at the Emirates Literature Festival, held from March 8 to 12, at the InterContinental Hotel, Dubai Festival City and the Cultural and Scientific Centre, Al Mamzar.