Irish writer, William Trevor died peacefully in his sleep during the early hours of 21 November 2016, at his home. He was 88 years old.
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. It was during this time that he and his wife had their first son.
His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958, but had little critical success. He later disowned this work and refused to have it republished.
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 resided until his death. 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 considered himself to be “Irish in every vein” (Wikipedia)
This spring CALA is offering a timely course in which William Trevor and his compatriots will feature. It will be taught by Nancy DiBenedetto.
LITR1-CE 9082 The Irish Short Story: Oscar Wilde to Edna O’Brien
If that’s not enough of the Irish for you, CALA has more in this one-session course from George Scheper, focusing on the “greening” of New York:
“I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.”
― William Trevor
Thank you for posting this biography of William Trevor, a writer’s writer if ever there was one. I know many who own a hard copy volume of his short stories. Mine was a gift from my sports writer brother-in-law. When I told him I was starting to write short stories he said, “I have a surprise for you.” It arrived in the mail a few days later. I had read a few of these stories in The New Yorker, admired them, but never had studied them from a writer’s perspective. I return to them over and over and never tire of the lucid, precise prose and compassionate rendering of every character. Such majesty I hope has also informed my nonfiction writing over the years.