William Trevor

William Trevor, born in 1928, Irish writer, best known for his novels and short stories. Trevor’s achievement is to capture the unhappiness, tragedies, disappointments, and cruelties of everyday life in new and affecting ways. Rendered in an unadorned prose style, his subject matter, generally set in either Ireland or England, is largely domestic, although it reflects the civil struggle and changing social conditions in Ireland.

Born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, he attended Trinity College, Dublin, graduating in 1950. He worked as a sculptor, a teacher of history and art, and at other jobs before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, A Standard of Behavior (1958), was followed by The Old Boys (1964), a novel about the idiosyncratic friendships and grudges among eight old men, which established Trevor’s distinctive style and subject matter. His other novels include Mrs. Echdorff in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969), Elizabeth Alone (1973), The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983), The Silence in the Garden (1988), Felicia’s Journey (1994), Death in Summer (1998), and The Story of Lucy Gault (2002). The Children of Dynmouth, Fools of Fortune, and Felicia’s Journey all won the Whitbread Award for best novel.

The title story in Trevor’s 1981 collection Beyond the Pale demonstrates his ability to take a relatively contained incident and comment more broadly on a political situation and on human nature in general. While the four middle-aged English characters, two men and two women, are in Ireland on their annual holiday, one of the women witnesses the suicide of an Irish man. She is subsequently forced to confront her own and her companions’ hypocrisies and failings in their personal as well as political lives.

Trevor’s other collections of short stories include The Day We Got Drunk on Cake (1969), The Ballroom of Romance (1972), Angels at the Ritz (1975), Lovers of Their Time (1978), The News from Ireland (1986), Family Sins (1989), Two Lives (1991), After Rain (1996), A Bit on the Side (2004), and Cheating at Canasta (2007). Trevor also edited the Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989). His nonfiction includes A Writer’s Ireland: Landscapes in Literature (1984) and the memoir Excursions in the Real World (1993).