William Trevor

William Trevor was born in 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, to a middle-class Protestant family. He moved several times to different towns in Ireland due to his father's work as a bank official. He studied history at Trinity College Dublin and worked as a sculptor and a teacher before moving to England in 1954. He began writing novels and short stories in the late 1950s, and achieved critical success with his second novel, The Old Boys, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 1964. He went on to write more than 15 novels and over 100 short stories, many of which are considered masterpieces of the form. He was widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of English literature, and received numerous awards and honours, including the Whitbread Prize three times, the David Cohen Prize, the Irish PEN Award, and the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award. He was also nominated five times for the Booker Prize, and was mentioned as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was known for his subtle and often dark portrayal of human nature, especially the lives of ordinary people in Ireland and England, who face moral dilemmas, loneliness, betrayal, and violence. He explored themes such as Irish history, culture, religion, class, and identity, with a keen sense of humour and compassion. He died in 2016 at the age of 88, leaving behind a legacy of brilliant and influential works of fiction.