Marina has novel take on success

Marina Lewycka (pictured below) says that as a woman she has to look like an author. Her dark hair is cut just above the shoulder, she wears a check jacket over a dark blue, bamboo-patterned blouse, black slacks and flat shoes.

She is speaking in the lounge of her Beijing hotel, before giving a talk at the Bookworm Festival last week, about her unusual rise to literary stardom. Her debut novel published when she was 59, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, sold a million copies in 30 languages.

Her second book, Two Caravans, is about migrant workers in Britain and was dedicated to the 21 Chinese immigrant cockle pickers who died in Morecambe, 2004, though the book is not about them directly.