The British-Ukrainian novelist Marina Lewycka, best known for her comic debut A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, has died aged 79 from a degenerative brain condition, her agent has confirmed.

Lewycka’s fiction often drew on her Ukrainian heritage and her family’s experiences as refugees. A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, published in 2005 when she was 58, became an unexpected international bestseller and was translated into 35 languages. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic writing, was longlisted for the Man Booker and shortlisted for the Orange prize for fiction.

“Marina burst on the scene with her memorable and bestselling first novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian,” said her agent, Bill Hamilton. “It introduced her unique comic sensibility, with a strong flavour of farce, matched with a campaigning sense of social justice, which played out magnificently over subsequent novels and in her public life.”

Juliet Annan, her former editor, also paid tribute to the author. “It was the greatest pleasure to edit and publish Marina,” Annan said. “There are very few true originals around and she was one of them – funny, warm, eccentric, political in the best way imaginable, impossible and wonderful. Her crusading fiction will live on as an extraordinarily serious and hilarious record of times and places.”

Lewycka was born in 1946 in a British-run refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, the daughter of two Ukrainians who had been taken there as forced labourers by the Nazis. Her family later moved to England, where she grew up and was educated.

Before becoming a novelist, she lectured in media studies at Sheffield Hallam University. While there, she joined a creative writing course and refined the manuscript that became A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.

The novel drew closely on her own life – sibling tensions, the loss of her mother, and an eccentric engineer father who remarries a much younger woman, prompting his daughters’ schemes to oust the interloper.

Lewycka was the only woman to win the Wodehouse prize in its first 16 years, and the success of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian established her as a distinctive voice in contemporary British fiction.

Her later novels included Two Caravans (2007), shortlisted for the Orwell prize for political writing; We Are All Made of Glue (2009); Various Pets Alive and Dead (2012); and The Lubetkin Legacy (2016), which was again shortlisted for the Wodehouse prize. Her final novel, The Good, the Bad and the Little Bit Stupid, was published in 2020.

In later years Lewycka, who lived in Sheffield, struggled with multiple system atrophy (MSA), a rare, progressive neurological disorder that causes the degeneration of nerve cells in the brain. One of the side effects is dysarthria, a motor disorder that causes weakness in the muscles used for speech.

Writing in the Guardian in 2020, she reflected on living with the condition: “I have come to depend on friends and the kindness of strangers … One of the few advantages of this condition is that I get to see human beings at their best.”

She added that although she wrote more slowly, “sometimes the mistakes can open up new avenues of creative thought … It keeps me smiling when there’s not much else to smile about”.

She is survived by her partner, Donald Sassoon, and her daughter, Sonia.