William Trevor

Biography

The writer’s real name was William Trevor Cox. He worked as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox, before taking the pen name by which readers know him.

He was born on 24 May 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, into a middle-class Anglo-Irish Protestant family (of the Church of Ireland). His father was a bank official, and because of his postings the family moved often: Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal, Enniscorthy. Trevor was educated at St Columba’s College in Dublin, where one of his teachers was Oisín Kelly, and then at Trinity College Dublin, where he took a degree in history.

After university he turned to sculpture, supplementing his income by teaching. In 1952 he married Jane Ryan, and soon the couple moved to England; by other accounts he emigrated in 1954. There Trevor taught art at Bilton Grange, a preparatory school near Rugby, received commissions for church reliefs, among them All Saints, Braunston, in Northamptonshire, and then worked as a copywriter for an advertising agency. In 1956 he moved to Somerset and made sculpture for churches, and in 1960 he gave up wood carving. In these years he and his wife had their first son.

His first novel, “A Standard of Behaviour”, came out in 1958 from Hutchinson in London and had little success. Trevor later disowned it and did not want it reissued; the book was nevertheless reprinted in 1982 and 1989.

In 1964, at thirty-six, he won the Hawthornden Prize for the novel “The Old Boys”; the award itself is dated to 1965 in some accounts. After that Trevor devoted himself entirely to literature. In 1971 the family moved from London to Devon, first to Dunkeswell and, from 1980, to Shobrooke, near Crediton. He lived there for the rest of his life.

The early novels are populated by eccentrics who speak in a pedantically formal manner, with a detached narrator telling their stories. Instead of one hero they have several of equal weight, brought together by an institution: a school, a boarding house, a hotel. The later books are more complex in conception and technique: events are seen by several narrators from different sides, and not all of them can be trusted. The setting is sometimes England, sometimes Ireland; the tone ranges from black comedy to stories tied to Irish history and politics. A frequent theme is the tension between Protestant landowners and Catholic tenants; he turned to the decline of the “Big House” in the novels “Fools of Fortune” and “The Story of Lucy Gault”.

The central figures of his stories are usually people on the margins: children, the elderly, single middle-aged men and women, the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept their lives invent another world and retreat into it. Some stories have Gothic elements, and evil in them is linked with madness. Trevor himself acknowledged the influence of James Joyce on his short stories. It seems to me that the comparison with Chekhov rests on something else: on a sympathy for his characters that does not stop him from seeing them as comic. Among the collections are “The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories” (1972), “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories” (1975), “Beyond the Pale” (1981), “The Collected Stories” (1992, 2009) and “Last Stories” (2018, posthumous). He also wrote the novels “Two Lives” (two novellas, “Reading Turgenev” and “My House in Umbria”, 1991), “Felicia’s Journey” (1994) and “Love and Summer” (2009); he edited “The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories” (1989) and published “A Writer’s Ireland: Landscape in Literature” (1984) and the memoir “Excursions in the Real World” (1993). He adapted much of his work for the stage, television and radio. Pat O’Connor made a film of “Fools of Fortune” in 1990, and Atom Egoyan filmed “Felicia’s Journey” in 1999.

He won the Whitbread Prize three times (for “The Children of Dynmouth” in 1976, “Fools of Fortune” in 1983 and “Felicia’s Journey” in 1994) and was nominated for the Booker Prize five times, reaching the shortlist in 1970, 1976, 1991 and 2002. Four times he received the annual American short story prize named after William Sydney Porter, for the stories “Sacred Statues”, “The Dressmaker’s Child”, “The Room” and “Folie à Deux” (2002–2008). In 2008 he was awarded the International Nonino Prize in Italy. He was made an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1977 and received an honorary knighthood in 2002; in 1994 he became a Companion of Literature of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2014 he was named Saoi, the highest honour of Aosdána, the Irish association of artists. He considered himself “Irish in every vein”.

A monument to the writer stands in Mitchelstown: a bronze lectern with an open book, unveiled on 25 August 2004. A plaque on the house where he was born was unveiled on 23 May 2008.

William Trevor died on 20 November 2016 in England, aged 88.