Biography

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 in 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 Great Britain 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. He and his family moved to Devon in South West England, where he has resided ever since. In 2002, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for services to literature. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considers himself to be "Irish in every vein".

Works and themes

He has written several collections of short stories that were well received. His short stories often follow a Chekhovian pattern. The characters in Trevor's work are typically marginalised members of society: children, the elderly, 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 Gothic elements to explore the nature of evil and its connection to 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 his 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 (usually Church of Ireland) 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.

Awards and honours

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 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.

Since 2002, when non-American authors became eligible to compete for the O. Henry Award, 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 "Folie à Deux" (2008).

Trevor was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2011.

Recognition

• 1964: Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys
• 1970: Mrs. Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• 1975: Royal Society of Literature for Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories
• 1976: Whitbread Award for The Children of Dynmouth
  • Allied Irish Banks Prize for fiction
  • Heinemann Award for Fiction
  • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• 1980: Giles Cooper Award for Beyond the Pale
• 1982: Giles Cooper Award for Autumn Sunshine
• 1982: Jacob's Award for TV adaptation of The Ballroom of Romance
• 1983: Whitbread Prize for Fools of Fortune
• 1991: Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize
• 1994: Whitbread Prize Best Novel for Felicia's Journey
• 1999: David Cohen Prize by the Arts Council of England in recognition of his work.
• 2001: Irish Literature Prize
• 2002: Irish PEN Award
• 2002: The Story of Lucy Gault was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award
• 2003: Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award at the Listowel Writers' Week
• 2008: Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature

Legacies

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.

Bibliography

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Novels and novellas

• A Standard of Behaviour (Hutchinson, 1958)
• The Old Boys (Bodley Head, 1964)
• The Boarding House (Bodley Head, 1965)
• The Love Department (Bodley Head, 1966)
• Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel (Bodley Head, 1969)
• Miss Gomez and the Brethren (Bodley Head, 1971)
• Elizabeth Alone (Bodley Head, 1973)
• The Children of Dynmouth (Bodley Head, 1976)
• The Distant Past (Poolbeg Press, 1979)
• Other People's Worlds (Bodley Head, 1980)
• Fools of Fortune (Bodley Head, 1983)
• Nights at the Alexandra (Hutchinson, 1987)
• The Silence in the Garden (Bodley Head, 1988)
• Two Lives (Viking Press, 1991)
• Felicia's Journey (Viking, 1994)
• Death in Summer (Viking, 1998)
• The Story of Lucy Gault (Viking, 2002)
• Love and Summer (Viking, 2009)
• The Dressmaker's Child (Penguin Books)

Short story collections

• The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1967)
• The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1972)
• The Last Lunch of the Season (Covent Garden Press, 1973)
• Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1975)
• Lovers of their Time (Bodley Head, 1978)
• Beyond the Pale (Bodley Head, 1981)
• The Stories of William Trevor (Penguin, 1983)
• The News from Ireland and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1986)
• Family Sins and Other Stories (Bodley Head, 1989)
• Outside Ireland: Selected Stories (Viking, 1992)
• The Collected Stories (Viking, 1992; Penguin, 1993, 2003)
• After Rain (Viking, 1996)
• Cocktails at Doney's (Bloomsbury Classics, 1996)
• The Hill Bachelors (Viking, 2000)
• A Bit On the Side (Viking, 2004)
• Cheating at Canasta (Viking, 2007)
• Bodily Secrets (Penguin Great Loves, 2007; new selection of stories from earlier collections)
• William Trevor (5 November 2009). The Collected Stories. ISBN 978-0-670-91833-1.
• Selected Stories (Viking, 2010), listed as "the second volume of his collected stories" ISBN 978-0-670-02206-9.

Short fiction

Title	Year	First published in	Reprinted/collected in
The women	2013	The New Yorker 88/43 (January 14, 2013)

Drama

• Play for Today: O Fat White Woman (1971, adaptation from short story)
• The Old Boys (Davis-Poynter, 1971)
• A Night with Mrs da Tanka (Samuel French, 1972)
• Going Home (Samuel French, 1972)
• Marriages (Samuel French, 1973)
• Scenes from an Album (Co-Op Books (Dublin), 1981)

Children's books

• Juliet's Story (Bodley Head, 1992)

Non-fiction

• A Writer's Ireland: Landscape in Literature (Thames & Hudson, 1984)
• Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs (Hutchinson, 1993)

As editor

• The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (Oxford University Press, 1989)

[ Source: Wikipedia ]