"He traveled in order to come home." -- William Trevor
William Trevor, KBE (born 24 May 1928) is an Irish author and playwright.
Trevor has resided in England since the 1950s. Over the course of his long career he has written several novels and hundreds of short stories. He is best-known for his short stories. . He has won the Whitbread Prize three times and has been nominated five times for the Booker Prize, most recently for his novel Love and Summer (2009). Tim Adams, a staff writer for The Observer, described him as "widely believed to be the most astute observer of the human condition currently writing in fiction".
"I value mothers and motherhood enormously. For every inattentive or abusive mother in my fiction I think you'll find a dozen or so who are neither.""The capacity you're thinking of is imagination; without it there can be no understanding, indeed no fiction.""There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes."
Born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland to a middle-class Protestant family, he moved several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy as a result of his father's work as a bank official. He was educated at St. Columba's College, Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received a degree in history. Trevor worked as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox after his graduation from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He married Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrated to England two years later, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958, but had little critical success. In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. The win encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer. Trevor and his family moved to Devon in England, where he has resided ever since. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considers himself to be "Irish in every vein".
He has written several collections of short stories that were well-received. His short stories often follow a Chekhov pattern. The characters in Trevor's work are usually marginalised members of society: children, old people, single middle-aged men and women, or the unhappily married. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat. A number of the stories use elements of the Gothic convention to explore the nature of evil and its connection with madness. Trevor has acknowledged the influence of James Joyce on his short-story writing, and "the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal" can be detected in his work. , but the overall impression is not of gloominess, since, particularly in the early work, the author's wry humour offers the reader a tragicomic version of the world. He has adapted much of his work for stage, television and radio. In 1990, Fools of Fortune was made into a film directed by Pat O'Connor, along with a 1999 film adaptation of Felicia's Journey, which was directed by Atom Egoyan.
Trevor's stories are set in both England and Ireland; they range from black comedies to tales based on Irish history and politics. Common themes in his works are the tensions between Protestant landowners and Catholic tenants. His early books are peopled by eccentrics who speak in a pedantically formal manner and engage in hilariously comic activities that are recounted by a detached narrative voice. Instead of one central figure, the novels feature several protagonists of equal importance, drawn together by an institutional setting, which acts as a convergence point for their individual stories. The later novels are thematically and technically more complex. The operation of grace in the world is explored, and several narrative voices are used to view the same events from different angles. Unreliable narrators and different perspectives reflect the fragmentation and uncertainty of modern life. Trevor has also explored the decaying institution of the "Big House" in his novels Fools of Fortune and The Story of Lucy Gault.
Trevor is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and Aosdána. He was awarded an honorary CBE in 1977 for "services to literature", and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994. In 2002 he received an honorary knighthood in recognition of his services to literature.
Trevor has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize five times, making the shortlist in 1970, 1976, 1991 and 2002, and the longlist in 2009. He has won the Whitbread Prize three times and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature once.
A monument to Trevor — a bronze sculpture by Liam Lavery and Eithne Ring in the form of a lectern, with an open book incorporating an image of the writer and a quotation, as well as the titles of his three Whitbread Prize-winning works, and two others of significance — was unveiled in Trevor's native Mitchelstown on 25 August 2004.
On 23 May 2008, the eve of his 80th birthday, a commemorative plaque, indicating the house on Upper Cork Street, Mitchelstown where Trevor was born, was unveiled by Louis McRedmond.
In 2002, non-American authors became eligible to compete for the prestigious O. Henry Awards. Trevor has won the award four times, for his stories "Sacred Statues" (2002), "The Dressmaker's Child" (2006), "The Room" (2007), a juror favourite of that year, and for "Folie à Deux" (2008).
Mary Fitzgerald-Hoyt: William Trevor — Re-imagining Ireland, Liffey Press, Dublin 2003; ISBN 978-1904148067
Dolores MacKenna: William Trevor — The Writer and His Work, New Island Books, Dublin 1999; ISBN 978-1874597742
Tom McAlindon: Tragedy, history, and myth: William Trevor's Fools of Fortune. (Critical Essay); in: Irish University Review: a journal of Irish Studies, 2003
Kristin Morrison: William Trevor, Twayne; New York 1993; ISBN 978-0805770322
Hugh Ormsby-Lennon: Fools of Fiction — Reading William Trevor's Stories, Maunsel& Co., Dublin 2004; ISBN 978-1930901216
Gregory A. Schirmer: William Trevor — A Study of His Fiction, Routledge, London 1990; ISBN 978-0415044936
