William Trevor, whose mournful, sometimes darkly funny short stories and novels about the small struggles of unremarkable people placed him in the company of masters like V. S. Pritchett, W. Somerset Maugham and Chekhov, died on Sunday in Somerset, England. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his son Patrick Cox.

Mr. Trevor, who was Irish by birth and upbringing but a longtime resident of Britain, placed his fiction squarely in the middle of ordinary life. His plots often unfolded in Irish or English villages whose inhabitants, most of them hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class, waged unequal battle with capricious fate.

In “The Ballroom of Romance,” one of his most famous stories, a young woman caring for her crippled father looks for love in a dance hall but settles, week after week, for a few drunken kisses from a local bachelor. The hero of “The Day We Got Drunk on Cake” repeatedly phones a young woman he admires in between drinking sessions at a series of pubs. The relationship deepens and, during a final call in the wee hours, takes a sudden, unexpected turn.

The emotional weather in Mr. Trevor’s world is generally overcast, with a threat of rain. “I am a 58-year-old provincial,” the narrator of the novel “Nights at the Alexandra” (1987) begins. “I have no children. I have never married.” From this bleak premise, a mesmerizing tale unfolds.</s>William Trevor, one of the most prolific, successful, well-respected and well-loved of modern Irish writers, has died at the age of 88.

He was perhaps unusual in maintaining something of an equal commitment to both the novel and the short-story form during his writing life.

He remained faithful to the short-story form because he regarded it as, in the words of one critic, “the natural expressive idiom of his native land”.

In his introduction to the Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989), he wrote: “The Irish delight in stories, of whatever kind, because their telling and their reception are by now instinctive.”

When his novel Love and Summer was shortlisted for the 2011 International Impac Dublin Award, Eileen Battersby described Trevor in The Irish Times as “revered by writers and readers all over the world” and as “living proof that fiction is an international language and that story is universal”.

William Trevor Cox was born in Mitchelstown, Co Cork. His father James William Cox, originally from Co Roscommon, worked in the bank, and his mother, Gertrude Davison from Co Armagh, was also a bank clerk until marriage.

In an interview he gave to the Guardian in September 2009, he described his parents as “lace-curtain Protestant” (ie, they did not belong to the “big house” or Anglo-Irish ascendancy), who hated each other.

He had two siblings and they were raised in what he recalled as a very lonely household.

He could never understand why his parents didn’t get on or make some effort to resolve their differences; he wondered if something had happened in the relationship that was hidden from the rest of the world.

This background may explain many of the characters he later created in his fiction.

Early schooling

His father’s bank job meant the family moved to various towns with each promotion he got. This resulted in Trevor attending 11 different primary schools.

The first of these was the Loreto in Youghal, where he was one of the few Protestant children.

In Excursions in the Real World (1993), he wrote: “I was treated fondly and recall neither prejudice nor attempts at religious influence.”

When the family moved to Skibbereen and he was sent to a Protestant school, where “education was less pleasant”.

After that, there were moves to Tipperary and Enniscorthy. For his secondary schooling he boarded at Sandford Park and afterwards St Columba’s College, both in Dublin.

At St Columba’s, his art teacher was Oisín Kelly, who became a famous sculptor and who encouraged Trevor’s interest in the subject.

He went to Trinity College Dublin in 1946 where, faute de mieux as he said himself, he studied history.

Following graduation, he taught in a private school near Killyleagh, Co Armagh, from 1950 to 1952.

He had met Jane Ryan at Trinity and they married in 1952. When his school closed and with Ireland in a deep recession, they emigrated to England.

Trevor taught art at prep schools near Rugby, Warwickshire, from 1952-1956 and at Taunton, Somerset from 1956-1960.

He also worked as a church sculptor for seven years, “rather like Jude the Obscure but without the talent”, he told the Guardian in 2009.

Move to London

With the birth of his first child he needed a better-paying job and the family moved to London, where he made a living writing advertisements.

“They would give me four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in.

“It was so boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my sculpture gushed out into the stories.”

In an interview for the Paris Review (spring 1989), he listed Somerset Maugham as his first strong influence, followed by Joyce and Irish short-story writers such as Frank O’Connor.

Through having short stories published in the London Magazine and the Transatlantic Review, he was approached by an editor who suggested he write a novel.

The result was The Old Boys (1964), which tells of the petty rivalries and odd behaviour of members of the alumni association of a small English public school.

It won the Hawthornden Prize and its success led to Trevor adapting it for television and then the stage. This meant he could give up the advertising-writing job, move to a small village in Devon and become a full-time writer.

The Boarding House (1965) continued his interest in eccentrics and misfits, in a story where the boarders scheme against each other.

The Love Department (1966) was a darkly comic story of a sexual pervert who gets his just deserts.

All three novels showed Trevor’s subtle comic vision as he created characters who were doomed in some way. A short-story collection The Day We Got Drunk on Cake and Other Stories (1967) followed, with its array of funny, melancholic and brutal characters.

The novels Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971) presented more characters living on the margin, their lives troubled by failure and disappointment.

Trevor experienced theatrical success with four plays in the early 1970s: the stage version of The Old Boys (1971), A Night with Mrs da Tanka (1972), Going Home (1972) and Marriages (1973).

Fascinated outsider

Up to this he had written mainly about the foibles of the English middle classes, viewing them from the perspective of a fascinated outsider.

Being an Irish Protestant meant he was also somewhat of an outsider in his own country. He believed that writers were outsiders, that they had no place in society because society was what they were watching.

He liked to live in the shadows and disliked the limelight.

The title story of The Ballroom of Romance and Other Stories (1972) is possibly his most famous short story.

Bridie, the main character, is a typical Trevor creation, lonely and yearning for love, her life stultified by the social realities of the rural Ireland of the time.

Elizabeth Alone (1973), a novel, also focuses on women leading frustrated lives.

Other novels of the 1970s were The Last Lunch of the Season (1973) and The Children of Dynmouth (1976), which won the Whitbread Novel Award, while short-story collections were Angels at the Ritz (1975), winner of a Heinemann Award, Lovers of Their Time (1978) and The Distant Past (1979).

Graham Greene described Angels at the Ritz as “one of the best collections, if not the best, since James Joyce’s Dubliners”.

Trevor’s radio plays Beyond the Pale (1980) and Autumn Sunshine (1982) won Giles Cooper Awards.

Novels of the 1980s were Other People’s Worlds (1980), Fools of Fortune (1983), Nights at the Alexandra (1987) and The Silence in the Garden (1988), Fools of Fortune winning a Whitbread Novel Award.

Short-story collections were Beyond the Pale (1981), The News from Ireland (1986) and Family Sins (1989), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction.

His later novels became structurally and narratively more complex.

Two Lives (1991) included Reading Turgenev (also awarded the Irish Literature Prize for Fiction) and My House in Umbria, in both of which the line between fact and imagination is blurred.

Juliet’s Story (1992) was his only children’s book, while the ambiguous Felicia’s Journey (1994) won Irish Times and Sunday Express awards as well as Whitbread Book of the Year.

Guilt

The short-story collections After Rain (1996) and The Hill Bachelors (2000) both won this paper’s Irish Literature Prize for Fiction, the latter also winning a PEN/Macmillan Award.

The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) was, according to one critic, “quite possibly the saddest story you have ever heard”; its pervasive theme is guilt and the need for forgiveness, especially self-forgiveness.

In the Guardian interview already mentioned, Trevor said that guilt, sorrow, shame and secrets were part of life.

“People should feel guilty sometimes. I’ve written a lot about guilt. I think that it can be something that really renews people.” Lucy Gault was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

His short-story collections A Bit on the Side (2004) and Cheating at Canasta (2007) have the familiar characters on the margins, who are lonely, and the familiar themes of shame, fear and isolation.

By contrast, the novel, Love and Summer (2009), which made it to the Booker longlist, is his most benign work and showed his writing powers undiminished in his 80s.

He was acclaimed both in the UK and Ireland. He was awarded an honorary CBE in 1977 for his services to literature and presented with an honorary knighthood in 2002.

Further, he was awarded the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature in 2008 and in 2011 he was elected saoi in Aosdána.

He told the Paris Review that he considered himself an Irish writer because, as an Irishman, he felt he belonged to the Irish tradition.

“I don’t really feel that being Irish is the important thing. What is important is to take Irish provincialism – which is what I happen to know about because it’s what I came from – and to make it universal.”

Trevor was a very disciplined writer, for much of his life being at his writing desk at 4am. Even as he got older, he continued the early start to his day, at the slightly later time of 6am or 6.30am.

He did an enormous amount of rewriting, often cutting large swathes of text, believing that what was omitted from a story could be as important as what was included.

The rest of the day he spent in his garden and at chats over cups of tea with his wife, Jane, to whom all his books are dedicated.

He is survived by her and by his sons Patrick and Dominic.</s>Writers pay tribute to three-time winner of the Whitbread prize who was ‘at his best the equal of Chekhov’

The Irish author William Trevor, one of the greatest short story writers of the last century, has died at the age of 88.

Trevor, the author of more than 15 novels and many more short stories, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize four times, most recently for The Story of Lucy Gault in 2002, the same year he was awarded an honorary knighthood for his services to literature. He also won the Whitbread prize three times and frequently contributed short stories to The New Yorker magazine.

His skill with the form drew comparisons with Chekhov, Maupassant and James Joyce. In a 1975 review of William Trevor’s short-story collection Angels at the Ritz, Graham Greene described it as “one of the best collections, if not the best since James Joyce’s Dubliners.”

William Trevor obituary Read more

Writers across Ireland were quick to pay tribute to an author who was described by Anne Enright as “a master craftsman … watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice”

Booker-winning novelist John Banville said: “I knew William Trevor only a little, but liked him very much, and admired him even more. His natural reticence, allied to his sense of the absurd, perhaps prevented him from attracting the international renown that he deserved – I cannot think of anyone less likely as a ‘celebrity’.

“He is one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov. So fine are his stories that they rather overshadow the novels, which is a pity, for at least one of them, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, I consider to be a masterpiece, inexplicably neglected.”

The novelist Roddy Doyle told the Irish Times: “The man – the work - was brilliant, elegant, surprising, reliable, precise, stark, often sad, sometimes funny, shocking and even frightening. His big houses were great; his small ones were wonderful too. The angst was bang-on, and so were all the other emotions and states. Every word mattered, every sentence was its own big house.”



As news spread internationally, Joyce Carol Oates was among the first to respond, tweeting: “William Trevor, one of the great short story writers. beautifully composed, lyrical, understated prose.”

Born in 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, William Trevor Cox attended St Columba’s College in Dublin and studied history at Trinity College, Dublin. His father worked for the Bank of Ireland and, on Desert Island Discs in 1980, he described how his family had trailed around County Cork “like middle class gypsies” as his father was promoted from one town to another.



By the time he arrived at university he was more interested in sculpture than history. “My presence at Trinity was a rather lackadaisical affair,” he told interviewer Roy Plomley.



In 1952, he married his college sweetheart Jane, to whom he dedicated many of his books.

A brief survey of the short story part 39: William Trevor Read more

After moving from Ireland to the Midlands in England, Trevor worked as an art teacher and then as a sculptor – “rather like Jude the Obscure without the talent” as he once described himself. It was not until he began working at a London advertising agency that he began to write.

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, which he subsequently disowned and refused to have reissued, was published in 1958. He would later describe The Old Boys, which was published in 1962 and won the Hawthornden prize, as his first book.

Many of Trevor’s early works were set in rundown, post-second-world-war London. In the mid-1970s, he turned his eye to his native Ireland, particularly the tensions between the Anglo-Irish gentry and the Catholic population. His depiction of smalltown life never touched upon cliché. As John Updike noted in a 1981 review: “Mr. Trevor knows, and dramatizes, two principal truths about low life: it never utterly lies down, but persists in asserting claims and values of its own derivation; and it cannot be fenced off and disowned by the fortunate.”

In a 1989 interview, Trevor compared writing short stories to impressionist art. “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,” he said.

Chris Power, surveying his short stories for the Guardian, said: “Like Joyce (and to a lesser extent, Chekhov), Trevor contrives to bury his own voice within that of his characters... the skill with which Trevor applies this technique is perhaps his greatest achievement as a writer; the irony is that he does it so well it’s virtually invisible.”

His novel The Story of Lucy Gault, was widely praised by critics – Hermione Lee called it “gravely beautiful, subtle and haunting” – but it lost out to Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi at the 2002 Man Booker. His last novel, Love and Summer, reached the longlist stage for the prize in 2009.

Trevor was awarded a CBE in 1977 for his services to literature, and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994.

In 2015, he was elected Saoi of Aosdána, an honour previously bestowed on writers including Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Irish president Michael Higgins paid tribute to Trevor as “a writer of world renown, of great distinction, of towering achievements, of elegance and grace.”

He enjoyed solitude and lived for many years in a secluded house in Devon, and would visit Ireland and Italy frequently. He is survived by his wife Jane and their two sons, Patrick and Dominic.</s>The Irish writer Sir William Trevor has died at the age of 88, his publisher has announced.

Trevor, the author of more than 15 novels and many short stories, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize four times, most recently for The Story of Lucy Gault in 2002, the same year he was knighted for his services to literature. He also won the Whitbread prize three times and frequently contributed short stories to The New Yorker magazine.

His skill with the form drew comparisons with Chekhov, Maupassant and James Joyce. In a 1975 review of William Trevor’s short-story collection Angels at the Ritz, Graham Greene described it as “one of the best collections, if not the best since James Joyce’s Dubliners.”

Among the first to react to news of his death was Joyce Carol Oates, who tweeted: “William Trevor, one of the great short story writers. beautifully composed, lyrical, understated prose.

Born in 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, William Trevor Cox attended St Columba’s College in Dublin and studied history at Trinity College, Dublin. His father worked for the Bank of Ireland and, on Desert Island Discs in 1980, he described how his family had trailed around County Cork “like middle class gypsies” as his father was promoted from one town to another.

By the time he arrived at university he was more interested in sculpture than history. “My presence at Trinity was a rather lackadaisical affair,” he told interviewer Roy Plomley.



In 1952, he married his college sweetheart Jane, to whom he dedicated many of his books.

After moving to London, Trevor initially worked as an art teacher and then as a sculptor – “rather like Jude the Obscure without the talent” as he once described himself. It was not until he began working at a London advertising agency that he began writing, at the age of 32.

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, which he subsequently disowned and refused to have reissued, was published in 1958. He would later describe The Old Boys, which was published in 1962 and won the Hawthornden prize, as his first book.

Many of Trevor’s early works were set in rundown, post-second-world-war London. In the mid-1970s, he turned his eye to his native Ireland, particularly the tensions between the Anglo-Irish gentry and the Catholic population. His depiction of smalltown life never touched upon cliché. As John Updike noted in a 1981 review: “Mr. Trevor knows, and dramatizes, two principal truths about low life: it never utterly lies down, but persists in asserting claims and values of its own derivation; and it cannot be fenced off and disowned by the fortunate.”

In an interview with the Paris Review in 1989, Trevor compared writing short stories to impressionist art. “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,” he said.

Chris Power, writing for the Guardian, said: “Like Joyce (and to a lesser extent, Chekhov), Trevor contrives to bury his own voice within that of his characters... the skill with which Trevor applies this technique is perhaps his greatest achievement as a writer; the irony is that he does it so well it’s virtually invisible.”

His novel The Story of Lucy Gault, was widely praised by critics – Hermione Lee called it “gravely beautiful, subtle and haunting” – but it lost out to Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi at the 2002 Man Booker. His last novel, Love and Summer, reached the longlist stage for the prize in 2009.

Trevor was awarded a CBE in 1977 for his services to literature, and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994.

In 2015, he was elected Saoi of Aosdána, an honour previously bestowed on writers including Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. Irish president Michael Higgins paid tribute to Trevor as “a writer of world renown, of great distinction, of towering achievements, of elegance and grace.”

He enjoyed solitude and lived for many years in a secluded house in Devon, and would visit Ireland and Italy frequently. He is survived by his wife Jane and their two sons, Patrick and Dominic.</s>The many novels and short stories of William Trevor, who died this week aged 88, and the adaptations for television and radio which he made of several of them, firmly and subtly stake out a territory he made his own.

From The Old Boys (1964) on, he ruefully chronicled the genteel, the isolated, the disappointed, the eccentric lives of quiet desperation. Trevor’s first half dozen or so books (including his debut, A Standard of Behaviour, published in 1958 and regarded by him as a false start) were set in England and drew on the comic frailties of the English, hopelessly stuck in the grooves of their youth, washed up querulously in boarding-houses, eating out their lonely hearts in Wimbledon. But then increasingly he began to draw on his own small town Irish background, re-creating it with gently melancholy nostalgia, flecked with comedy but also burdened with impotence.

William Trevor Cox (as a writer, he always used the shortened form of his name) was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, on Empire Day 1928. His father worked for the Bank of Ireland, and throughout Trevor’s childhood the family moved from one small town to another in the south of Ireland, the boy going to 13 different schools. JW Cox was himself a southerner, the family Catholic until late in the 18th century, when (as Trevor put it), “they turned in order to survive the Penal Laws”. His mother was brought up in the North, in County Armagh, a product of “sturdy Ulster Protestantism”. Though Trevor and his brother were loved, and loved their parents in return, the parents were unhappy, and they separated as soon as their sons were off their hands. Years later, Trevor wrote acutely and movingly of all this, unjudging but undeceived in his “Field of Battle”, part of his autobiographical collection Excursions in the Real World (1993).

After his succession of bizarre schools, he had an undistinguished career at Trinity College, Dublin, where he began haplessly in the Medical School, then moved quickly to history. But he came to know and love the city, on long night walks; and he met Jane Ryan, to whom he was married soon after they graduated. It was a supremely happy and long-lasting marriage. Many of his books are dedicated to Jane, others to their sons Patrick and Dominic.

His first job was as a prep-school master in a rapidly declining establishment in County Armagh. When it went bankrupt, he and Jane moved to England, where he found himself teaching art near Rugby, at what he called the second most expensive prep-school in the country. He had, in his spare time, become a skilful wood-carver and sculptor, and indeed had the distinction of winning the Irish section of the "Unknown Political Prisoner" sculpture competition. The final winner was Reg Butler. Trevor was commissioned to make extensive wood-carvings for the church at Braunston, the village where he lived while teaching at the school. Buoyed up a little by these successes, and now thinking of himself as a professional sculptor, he and Jane moved to Somerset, where he sent off work here and there to exhibitions, and eked out a meagre living by teaching art two days a week.

But Trevor’s efforts in the plastic arts didn’t satisfy him (he resented his increasing tendency to “go abstract”), nor did they bring in much money. By now Jane was pregnant. He had managed to finish, and even find a publisher for, his novel A Standard of Behaviour; but Hutchinson did badly with it. If both sculpture and fiction were unrewarding, what could he do?

In 1959, the year after his failed first novel, he somehow heard that there was an advertising agency in London which welcomed “creative writers”. This was Notley’s, the copy chief of which was Marchant Smith (who “resembled, almost perfectly, an egg placed on top of a much larger egg”). The man who notoriously made Notley’s into “a nest of singing birds”, variously employing the poets Peter Porter, Peter Redgrove, Gavin Stewart, Edward Lucie-Smith, and Edwin Brock. Marchant Smith took Trevor on, and early in 1960 Trevor reported for duty.

For some time he had nothing to do. Then he had too much to do. As a copywriter, Trevor found himself wanting. But meanwhile he began another novel, much of which he wrote in office time, on office paper. This was The Old Boys. He also wrote a few short stories, some of which were published by the London Magazine and by another literary journal of the period, Transatlantic Review, run by an enlightened young American millionaire. These stories caught the attention of James Michie, editorial director of the Bodley Head, who – either ignoring, or not having noticed, the dismal fate of A Standard of Behaviour – wrote to enquire whether Trevor had a first novel to offer.

Publishers ought to take notice of Michie’s tactics, once he had accepted The Old Boys. Many publishers flood literary editors, book-sellers, the literary trade in general, with a profusion of ecstatic stuff about the works of genius about to appear. This debases the currency: the encomia cancel out. But Michie didn’t do this. If he saw something was very good, one took notice, because he was notably sincere.

Early in 1964, when I was literary editor of the Listener, Michie sent me a short “personal” letter about a forthcoming Bodley Head novel (Michie I knew only at a distance, as a clever, sharp, sparse poet, and an occasional rather louche visitor on the scene in my undergraduate years at Oxford a decade earlier). He drew my attention to a novel he thought the funniest he had read for many years, and enclosed a proof.

These must have been Michie’s tactics with a number of people, and the ploy succeeded. Not only was I completely dazzled by the sad and hilarious originality of this book (as was the reviewer to whom I sent it), but much weightier people quickly added their superscriptions: Evelyn Waugh called it “uncommonly well-written, gruesome, funny and original”, and all the reviews continued to echo this.

It is indeed a wonderful novel, capable of much re-reading. Reading it myself for the first time, I did what I have very seldom done, and wrote a fan-letter to this unknown William Trevor. Meanwhile, or very soon after, I was raving about it to my friend Peter Porter. He astonished me by saying, “Oh, I know Trevor – we work together at Notley’s. You ought to meet.” Then a short note of pleased acknowledgment arrived from Trevor himself, and we met.

What I remember of our first meeting, or early meetings, is what stays with me still, from more than 30 years of friendship: a wry courtly gentleness, the archaic vowels and word-endings (“orf”, “gawn”, the missing “g” sounds at the ends of verbs and participles – “huntin”’, “lookin”’, which marked him as Protestant ascendancy; but, even more, the amused alertness to what was said or observed. He would note a curious couple in the corner, and convincingly deduce who they were, and why they were there. He would take in, with the subtlest of antennae, the voices of others in the restaurant or bar.

That was one of Trevor’s great gifts – observer, overhearer. He listened. In the interviews with journalists which he increasingly gave as his fame grew, he remarked: “Even now, when people say they’re sorry for rambling on so, I’ve found myself replying that listening is part of the job. ‘Please go on,’ I’ve found myself urging.” He had the most acute ear of any post-war novelist.

The success of The Old Boys meant that, within a few years, he could go freelance. He and Jane moved from Putney to rural Devon where they had bought an Edwardian house with a large garden. He, was a keen – but not too keenly obtrusive – gardener. He worked regular hours at the writing trade, and became much less fond of party-going and pubs. He liked travelling (often to Italy, and to the Ticino in Switzerland), but even these were workdays rather than holidays. He liked to have what he called “a good morning’s work" – which meant something like 8am until a late lunch. His gentle, friendly, relaxed, quizzical manner always had behind a sense of the driven man.

Gradually, the prizes poured in. The Old Boys won the Hawthornden Prize (slipped to him under the table, so Trevor said, by Lord David Cecil); he went on to take the Society of Authors travelling fellowship in 1971, with which he journeyed to what was then called Persia; in 1976, the triple distinction of the Heinemann fiction award, the Allied Irish Banks prize, and the first of three Whitbread Awards culminating in the overall top award in 1995. He was made a Member of the Irish Academy of Letters, had honorary doctorates from universities (Exeter; Trinity College, Dublin; Queen’s University, Belfast), and in 1977 was made an honorary CBE (it had, apparently, to be honorary because he retained his Irish citizenship, though for so long resident in England).

Trevor’s awareness of his “Irishness” never left him, though he was no sort of partisan. He loathed the violence of Ireland – though he once said in conversation that the most effective move would be for someone to assassinate Ian Paisley. Politics bored him, but passion did not and he recognised the passions on both sides in Ireland. At the same time his imagination moved nimbly among matters that, though violent, had nothing to do with Ireland. One of his most memorable novels is The Children of Dynmouth (1976), which centres on an adolescent misfit and psychopath in England. His imagination ranged across many different places and people.

Some have said that his greatest gifts are as a short-story writer. Graham Greene, John Fowles, Francis King and John Banville all said so. Others would see him slightly extended beyond this, as the masterly adaptor of his award-winning stories for the television screen and this is certainly the means through which he won his biggest audiences. For myself, I see Trevor as perhaps the most remarkable all-round prose writer of our time, someone who managed effectively to use all the literary means in his brilliant range.</s>Detached sympathy, irony and a masterful grasp of the essential menace lurking at the heart of human existence partly – although only partly – attempts to explain the fluid, diverse genius of William Trevor’s singular art.

His fiction is that of a confirmed realist; he has chronicled the lonely, the eccentric, the pathetic and the unloved. He knew how damaged people could be; he was also acutely aware of the cruelty and coldness of which humans are capable.

While the world debated the conflicting merits of awarding this year’s Nobel prize for literature to the great American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, others wondered why not honour a supreme storyteller such as William Trevor?

Indeed, in 2013 when the Stockholm committee did select a writer, Canadian Alice Munro, I can recall writing “wonderful”, while adding, it could just as easily have been, should have been Trevor, a short-story writer of far wider range who has also written superb novels, such as Fools of Fortune, Reading Turgenev, The Story of Lucy Gault and Love and Summer.

Few writers had as strong a claim; perhaps none have been as regrettably overlooked. Seamus Heaney deserved to win the Nobel Prize; Trevor would have been an equally deserving winner.

Many novelists and short-story writers when asked about their major influences invariably single him out. An Irish writer, an international writer, a great writer. Put bluntly he is revered by writers. “I don’t have language rich enough to describe all I owe to William Trevor, ” said Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri when I interviewed her in 2008.

Throughout his career Trevor defied the stock “write what you know” advice given to aspiring writers. The least autobiographical of major Irish writers, he looked to the imagination and as an astute, natural psychologist believed in foraging the unpredictable depths of human behaviour. He knew the value of distance, the role of the observer. A writer must listen, he did and it shows.

This apparently most unexperimental of writers experimented every time he sat down to write. Sophisticated but never slick, he was adventurous; prepared to try anything in the pursuit of a story needing to be told.

In all wrote 14 novels – 15, if Reading Turgenev (from Two Lives, 1991), at 222 pages, is correctly considered a novel – and 11 individual short story collections, or more than 140 stories, many among the finest written in English.

Trevor the writer is extraordinary, familiar yet elusive. In person he was gentle, kind, unassuming and gracious, a very rare gentleman who could conceal the relentless concentration he applied to pursuing the ideas and the characters which occupied his busy mind.

At a time such as this, death, the expected tributes will flow. But the truth remains that Trevor, who ranks high among the world’s greatest writers and has an undisputed international reputation, has frequently, inexplicably, drifted out from the central Irish literary consciousness. Asodána conferred the honour of Saoi, or wise man, on Trevor as recently – one might suggest belatedly – as 2015.

All too often whether in debate or conversation when Irish writers are discussing the national literature, Trevor is overlooked, or seen as not entirely Irish – how wrong.

One need look no further than The Hill Bachelors (2000), a superb collection of wonderful stories set mostly in Ireland, which includes Against the Odds. Trevor knew Ireland – and at every vocal and cultural register.

If there is one telling sentence among so very many as his admirers look to his work in the initial stages of absorbing the loss of a writer who so honoured and graced the art of story, it may be this from Reading Turgenev: “Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.”

Describing him as a miniaturist exploring quiet lives of desperation is akin to saying Jane Austen wrote about girls in need of wealthy husbands. Trevor, in common with Austen, was an instinctive stylist, alert to the exactness of language, the power of nuance, be it Irish or English, Anglo-Irish Protestant, middle class Irish Protestant – the social milieu to which he belonged – or Catholic, and above all, he delighted in the captivating allure of ambivalence. “The two youths walked the way they’d come that morning, both of them wondering if the nerve to kill was something you acquired.” (A Bit of Business, from After Rain, 1995).

He could also be very funny. In Honeymoon in Tramore (From Family Sins, 1990), a woman already pregnant by one man succeeds in getting another to marry her and, as they enjoy their wedding breakfast, the landlady is heard remarking of her husband’s dim-witted greyhound, “Would any animal in its sane mind keep getting into the cement mixer?”

Trevor looked to the forgotten, the despairing losers trapped on shabby, failing family farms, or caught up in the non-life of a provincial town, perhaps working in a defeated local shop. He examined the innocent and also the devious. This much is true, yet there is also so much more. The marvel and also the dilemma of Trevor’s unflustered, sophisticated vision, filtered through his understated prose is that it has a deceptively wide range.

Even admirers of Trevor’s work may not have experienced the full extent of his canvas – there is a great deal of reading in Trevor’s oeuvre. Not by chance were so many British and American critics initially convinced Trevor was an English writer. To fully appreciate the extent of his gifts, from the humane to the sinister, it is vital to read as much of it as possible – in fact all of it. Read a few stories, you will agree that he is a great writer; read most or all of it and you will be awestruck.

It is as if he inherited the qualities of the great 19th century Russian masters and allowed them to mingle freely with the finest Irish and American masters of the short-story form. He often said that his novels were in fact each a series of story stories contained within one story; he may well be right, yet that does not diminish their success as novels.

Trevor’s rare versatility lies in his command of voice – he matched Elizabeth Bowen’s cool authority, could mimic the stiff manners of the English middle classes yet was equally at home in the world of Kavanagh’s virtuoso exploration of the tragic comedy of rural Ireland. His stories stand equal to those of Frank O’Connor, Somerset Maugham, V.S. Pritchett, John Updike and John Cheever.

The most obvious comparison though is Anton Chekhov – that is where one most accurately places Trevor, the heir of Chekhov.

It has been suggested that Trevor’s vision is a genteel variation of John McGahern’s powerfully emotive rigour. Yet McGahern’s abiding focus on the individual is strongly autobiographical and is in tone as well as stylistically and thematically y narrower than that of Trevor, who drew so astutely on his peripatetic childhood in the small towns of provincial Munster.

Clouding easy assessment of Trevor are the insightful, sharply ironic tales featuring the bored and prosperous middle classes of west London suburbs populated by idle, adulterous characters at the mercy of their devious ploys and haphazard deceptions, all as adroit and authentic as his Irish narratives.

The details are irrelevant, whether a lonely shadowy character is enduring existence in an Irish provincial town or a London bedsit, Trevor was an all-seeing, witty and at times, unpredictable observer capable of empathy and savagery. “People run away to be alone ... Some people had to be alone.” (From Death and Summer, 2009).

Trevor catches the voice of everywhere because he always considered himself to have come from nowhere in particular. There is the humour in his work, yet so much sorrow. Why?

Born William Trevor Cox in Cork in 1928, the middle of three children of a bank official father whose job kept the family in transit, Trevor once referred to his parents as having “carted” their unhappy marriage around with them. A child who has witnessed adults at each other’s throats tends not to forget the spectacle and Trevor didn’t.

He described his childhood as that of a “middle-class gypsy” during which he attended 13 schools throughout provincial Ireland before arriving at Sandford Park, Dublin, in 1941 when he was 13. Two years later he moved on to St Columba’s, also in Dublin. From there he entered Trinity College and after a day as a medical student, opted for a history degree. Initially, he was drawn sculpture not writing because he didn’t much care for the ‘literary’ set among his fellow pupils.

He worked as a teacher in Ireland for three years but when the school closed, no further posts were forthcoming. Employment caused Trevor to move to England in 1953.

By then he had married the London-born but very Irish Jane Ryan whom he had met at Trinity. He taught art in the English midlands for three years before settling in Devon. There he returned to sculpture and also began to write.

In the time-honoured tradition of many writers, he spent five years in advertising.There was a first novel, Standard Behaviour, published in 1958. But he disowned it and continued writing.

The Old Boys (1964) is generally regarded as his debut. It began his career in some style; prizes and the freedom to become a full-time writer. Evelyn Waugh hailed it as “uncommonly well-written, gruesome, funny and original”. What more would an aspiring writer need? Trevor was 36.

The Old Boys is a hilarious and accomplished account of Mr Jaraby’s determined bid to become president of the Old Boys Association, despite many victims of his cruel schoolboy bullying are still alive, as are their grievances. Jaraby is delightfully vile: constantly goading his disgruntled wife, who is no slouch at vicious repartee.

The Boarding House (1965) and The Love Department (1966), both less memorable, quickly followed.

The publication of The Day We Got Drunk (1967) proved significant. It was his first collection and several of its seven stories concentrated on themes which were to become Trevor territory – loneliness, alienation, middle-class marriage, the elderly reduced to easy prey.

The nastiness of human interaction is also evident in Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel (1969) and Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Within a year, Trevor published what was to be a landmark book for him, his second volume of stories, The Ballroom of Romance. The poignant title story reveals the early maturity of Trevor’s daunting narrative skill. Bridie, tends her widower father, and is a middle-aged child, waiting for her chance at love. Her only hope rests in the pathetic Bowser Egan, a representative of a familiar type, the aging bachelor content to delay marriage until a widowed mother dies.

In O Fat White Woman, Mrs Digby-Hunter is one of the first of Trevor’s many studies of disappointed wives. She knows how to treat her pain: “On the short grass of the lawn, tucked out of sight beneath her deck-chair, was a small box of Terry’s All Gold chocolates, and on her lap, open at page eight, lay a paper-backed novel by her second favourite writer of historical fiction.”

Characterisation is possibly Trevor’s defining strength, he was particularly skilful with female characters who range from the vulnerable to the vengeful; the likeable to the predatory. Elizabeth Alone (1973), a landmark novel for him in many ways, is about the lives of four very different women who are patients in a London hospital ward. Their collective experiences weave in and out of Trevor territory; bad marriages, failed romance, age, sexual repression, religious fanaticism and always, the randomness of existence. Elizabeth is a memorable and sympathetic creation, conscious that “the years were like useless leaves, dead now. Yielding no memories that she wanted”.

The Children of Dynmouth (1976), the first of Trevor’s three Whitbread-winning novels, reveals exactly how adroit he is with darkness. Young Timothy Gedge (great name – Trevor had a Dickensian flair for name) is a misfit intent on blackmailing selected individuals living in an English seaside town to secure the props required for a gruesome one-man show he is keen on staging.

The narrative highlights an aspect of Trevor’s work which is overlooked – its prevailing strangeness. Timothy, peculiar and creepily unwholesome, is a truth-teller. He also offers a glimpse of one of Trevor’s most memorable baddies, Hilditch, the deeply sinister if pathetic catering manager in Felicia’s Journey which in 1995 would win Trevor his third Whitbread Prize.

Following the publication of The Children of Dynmouth, some critics began to slightly revise their opinion of Trevor. Here was a writer capable of anything, prepared to inject a more threatening form of menace.

Another collection of stories, Lovers of their Time, dominated by Matilda’s England, a three-part story, was published in 1978. It revealed a subtle transition. In the story the narrator admits to having a life-long obsession with Challacombe Manor and its previous owner. The old woman had attempted, shortly before her death, to partly restore the place to its former glory, by way of a tennis court. The atmospheric period feel of that narrative is more usually associated with Trevor’s Anglo-Irish stories.

Ireland had already begun to assert itself fully in Trevor’s imagination. Often criticised for being too removed from Ireland, he calmly dismissed the accusation. He always made a point of reading Irish newspapers and visited Ireland often, particularly while his sister was still alive. She had spent her life tending their parents and by cruel irony she emerged as a character he could have created.

As with Heaney, Trevor was felt not to have engaged with the conflict in the North. This is untrue; he looked to the historical and then engaged with the political. Fools of Fortune (1983) encapsulates the chaos and contradictions of post-Treaty Ireland. It is a starkly beautiful work. Trevor conveys the pathos and the anger in a narrative which helps define not only the Anglo-Irish culture but also its passing.

Ireland’s history also inspires the title story from The News From Ireland collection (1986) in which an English governess records her observations of the Famine in her journal: “Last night I could not sleep again. I lay there thinking of the starvation, of the faces of the silent women when they come to the gate lodge for food. There’s a yellow-greyness in the flesh of their faces, they are themselves like obedient animals. Their babies die when they feed them grass and roots.”

The depravity of Hilditch in Felicia’s Journey is countered by his pathetic mediocrity. He is the consummate unlikely villain with his pudgy hands, high-pitched voice and fondness for junk food. Into his orbit wanders Felicia, the ruined young Irish girl who hurries to England in pursuit of a caddish lover who had fed her lies.

The plot sounds like stock melodrama, but Trevor’s characterisation, feel for voice and use of thriller-like suspense confers tragic grandeur. Above all, in Hilditch, he has created a shocking though sympathetic study of evil spiralling out of control. As ever Trevor seemed alert to human weakness and the way desires can become corrupt and corrupting.

For sheer beauty, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002) is difficult to surpass. It was an honour to be a judge for the Irish Fiction Award at Listowel Writers Week when this poignant, perfectly balanced human tragedy won the prize, and Trevor was so delighted holding the book at the presentation.

Curiosity shaped his approach to life and writing. He once told me that his head was full of characters and he had to find out what they were doing. Everything one can hope to learn about life and fiction is contained within the glimpses of humanity created by him. A bold claim? Yes it is, yet a justified one.

Trevor with his sweet smile and the puckered face of a benign schoolmaster, his slightly distracted air; how well did he know Ireland? As well as he knew people.

A story such as The Dressmaker’s Child, published in the New Yorker in 2004, and in the impressive collection, Cheating at Canasta, says so very much about the world we all inhabit. Humour, wit, ruthless clarity and elegance, he saw through pretence.

The collection After Rain was published in 1996 and I remember wondering could short stories get any better. In The Piano Tuner’s Wives, Belle in old age finally gets to marry her beloved after his first wife dies; the locals show no mercy: “Well, she got the ruins of him anyway.”

Reading Trevor’s work has been an enduring experience of my life. He makes the ordinary and familiar, new and shocking. Fiction does not have to be real, but it does have to be true.

William Trevor knew that and made sure it was.</s>Cork-born writer William Trevor has died at the age of 88, it has been announced.

His publisher Penguin Random House UK said he passed away on Sunday night.

The novelist was born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, in 1928, and educated at St. Columba’s College in Dublin and Trinity College Dublin.

He later married Jane Ryan, whom he had met at university, and to whom he dedicated many of his books. They moved to England where Trevor set himself up as a sculptor ‘rather like Jude the Obscure without the talent’ as he once described himself.

The first of his two sons was born in London where Trevor got a job as copywriter and it was only when he took a full-time job at a London advertising agency that he really began writing, his publisher said in a statement.

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, which he subsequently disowned and refused to have republished, was published in 1958.

In later years he chose to describe The Old Boys, which was published in 1964 and went on to win the Hawthornden Prize for Literature, as his first novel.

“In its comedic portrayal of unseemly, sometimes desperate behaviour hidden beneath a thin veil of decorum, it prefigured the theme of most of his early and middle-period novels, many of them set in a rundown, post-War London,” the publisher said.

“Later he turned his attention to his native Ireland, and in particular the tensions between the fading Anglo-Irish gentry and their Catholic neighbours. These were more complex books, exploring ideas of loyalty and betrayal, loss and belonging, often through multiple viewpoints, but always with a deeply felt compassion for all his characters.”

Trevor went on to write over fifteen novels. He won the Whitbread Prize three times and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize four times, most recently with The Story of Lucy Gault in 2002.

It was a favourite to win, but lost out to The Life of Pi.

Penguin Random House UK said Trevor’s novels were widely admired but it was perhaps on his short stories that his literary reputation would come to rest.

“For many years a contributor of stories to the New Yorker, he had a firm belief that the short story was as great an art form as the novel, and as difficult to write.

“His Collected Stories, published by Viking in two volumes in 2009, runs to almost 2000 pages, and the best of them, including The Ballroom of Romance, Kathleen’s Field and Cheating at Canasta, are among the greatest stories of the last half-century, drawing comparison with the earlier masters of the form, Chekhov, Maupassant and Joyce.”

Described as “a modest and private man”, Trevor disliked talking about his books and abhorred any personal publicity, believing that the work should stand for itself.

“He lived for many years in a secluded house in Devon, visiting Ireland frequently, taking walking holidays in Italy, and pursuing his passions of gardening and watching sport – especially rugby, cricket and tennis. But it was writing that truly absorbed him.”

In September 2015, in a ceremony presided over by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, Trevor was elected Saoi of Aosdána, an honour also bestowed on writers such as Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney.

Mr Higgins then paid tribute to Trevor as “a writer of world renown, of great distinction, of towering achievements, of elegance and grace”.

He is survived by his wife Jane and their two sons, Patrick and Dominic.</s>William Trevor was one of the great short-story writers, at his best the equal of Chekhov and Babel. But we should also celebrate his novels, in particular Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, an inexplicably neglected twentieth-century masterpiece. His prose style was so subtle as to seem hardly a style at all, and his sympathy for, an empathy with, life’s wounded ones was sincere and affecting. His death is a heavy loss to Irish letters and to world literature.

William Trevor was a complete gentleman and full of mischief: at least that is how I thought of him when we met some years ago. I found him to be an irresistible mix of good manners and badness, in the Irish sense of the word – there was little that escaped him. His stories are formally beautiful and, at the same time, interested in the smallness of human lives. He was, as a writer, watchful, unsentimental, alert to frailty and malice. A master craftsman, he was, above all, interested in loneliness, especially the loneliness found between social classes. In the Irish stories especially, he caught the last of a fading colonial past and set it, in a kind of twilight, on the page.

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William Trevor is stranger than we think - he has somehow developed a reputation as a kind of domestic realist but in fact he just as often writes in the gothic tradition, and he is at his best when he’s at his eeriest. I have a particular regard for some of the very strange, very slender novels of the early 1970s; The Children of Dynmouth, in particular, has a very creepy waft to it, and it was very prescient in describing the odd atmospheric energies that were starting to develop around small English towns and suburbs.

And of course I admire any writer who persists in making short fictions throughout his career. It’s not always the most glamorous or most rewarding sector, but it is one of the most difficult and impenetrable forms: it takes a lifetime’s work to get close to its mysteries, and he gave it that. Also, he always carried himself with immense dignity, and thus was an example to the rest of us.

In recent years we’ve seen a welcome resurgence of interest in writing and reading short stories but William Trevor was the constant and most elegant master of the form over an astounding five decades of writing. The elegiac beauty of his novels such as The Silence in the Garden and The Story of Lucy Gault - sometimes ‘boxed’ into the category of ‘Big House’ fiction - will, for their tender and nuanced portraits of communities in decline, be recommended from reader to reader for generations to come. And Trevor was also a wonderfully astute literary commentator. A personal favourite comes from a Paris Review interview when asked to define the short story: ‘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.’

Margaret Kelleher is chair of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, University College Dublin

A few years ago, my then partner gave me a beautiful two-volume hardback and slip-cased edition of William Trevor’s Collected Stories for Christmas. It’s one (or two) of the most beautiful books that I own and stands beside a dozen other William Trevor volumes on my shelves. Writers often get asked which authors they return to again and again, their comfort books if you will, the ones that make them remember why fiction matters. William Trevor, I have answered on countless occasions. His stories. Any of them.

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William Trevor’s great stories well up from the deep in an unending seam that taps into personal memory and a greater consciousness so that when you read them, you feel that these things are real, they have happened. There is nothing forced, no whiff of research. He has said that his sense of tragedy came from childhood which along with dreams is the source of all poetry according to Rilke. He drank from that well for decades and miraculously, it never ran dry. Graham Greene has spoken of the compost of memory from which writers create. I imagine Trevor’s compost pile as big as County Cork where he spent his formative years and where his best most charged writing is set although I may be biased.

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What sad news. My sister got cross with me once for not reading enough of his work. You have to, she said, you just have to, and she was right. He was as good as a writer can be: he seemed to live a creative life dedicated to the understanding of individual truths and the nature of difference, to the stories concealed by silence. His work was often hilariously funny and deeply moving. I loved the lofty, didactic, completely dishonest voices he sometimes used, and the comedy he revealed in the tensions created by differences real and perceived. He never stopped feeling that most essential thing to writers: wonder. He never stopped asking, How would that person see the world?

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William Trevor was a gentle and courteous man, a peerless writer, a laureate of the settled sadness of so many Irish lives. In his beautiful novel, Love and Summer, he writes: “Although they were more than brother and sister, having been born in the same few minutes, they had never shared a resemblance. In childhood they had been close companions but often now did not communicate with one another for weeks on end, though less through not being on speaking terms than having nothing to say.”

His prose gave a voice to the people who have nothing to say, who live in the rainstorms of emotion but don’t have a language to express it. An assiduous stylist as well as a clear-eyed and humane storyteller, he never wasted a word or deployed a flashy metaphor. His prose doesn’t try to wow you. It stirs deeper recognitions. He has a way of not describing but incarnating characters on the page, often through silence, the realities he opts not to reveal. So alive with a kind of underground water of heart and empathy, yet so understated and layered, too, his short stories and novels will always be valued by people who love fiction.

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Almost 40 years ago I edited, with Andrew Carpenter, a book called The Writers (O’Brien, 1980) which presented new work by writers we’d invited to take part in a series of readings in London as part of A Sense of Ireland. William Trevor contributed his characteristically elegant, lucid prose in a story called Autumn Sunshine set in a rectory near Enniscorthy. As so often, he remembered and recreated Ireland from his home in Devon.

We met at the Poetry Society in Earl’s Court when, after his reading, I commended him and then thought to add, But you must be an old hand at this. And he responded, I’ve never been asked to do this before. This is the first reading I’ve ever given. He was 52.

I won’t pretend I knew him well but I was happy to attend when he and the marvelous Edna O’Brien were conferred with the torcs of Saoithe and I’m happy now to acknowledge the consummate art of a courteous man. Despite the regularity of his output its standard never dipped.

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William Trevor was a master craftsman whose restrained and subtle probing into the heart of the human condition I grew to admire ever more deeply over the years, as I came to a greater understanding of how deftly he unlocked the most secretive of emotions, in a unobtrusive turn of phrase or delicately understated shift of tone. This meant that, having seemingly presented you with the familiar, he then adroitly pitched you into the unknown: into layers of disappointment, resignation or unspoken love lodged so deeply in his characters’ hearts that they were barely aware of it. It was not so much that Trevor had no time for pyrotechnics, as that he had no need for them – being blessed with an uncanny ability to blast his way to the heart of things in quiet, restrained and yet emotionally devastating short stories and novels.

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For many reasons, William Trevor will be reckoned as one of the most influential writers of the twentieth and twenty first century but I think his work as the gifted inheritor of the Big House novel tradition will be seen as one of his greatest achievements. In his sparse, beautifully judged, elegiac novel, the Story of Lucy Gault, ( 2002), Trevor extended the range of a powerful literary mode, continuing on with the writings of Edgeworth, Moore, Somerville and Ross and his most significant predecessor, Elizabeth Bowen and bringing the story of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish family, the lost child and the abandoned house right up to this century. Also, for anyone who writes novels, or teaches creative writing, Reading Turgenev is simply a perfect novel to contemplate, apparently artless but achieving a sharpness and an intensity of emotion and loss in the clear lines of the developing narrative. And in both novels, the inner life of books, the way in which his characters live though the life of the imagination is captured as few other writers can. I remember the pleasure in buying a new William Trevor collection of short stories, and am grateful for the feeling of anticipation of each new book brought, knowing that they would never disappoint. And they never did.

William Trevor was one of the most courteous writers I ever met. He told me that he had no roots at all, he never knew where to say he came from: his father moved from town to town all over Ireland while working his way up from bank clerk to manager. Perhaps this is why so many of his stories, among the greatest in Irish literature, feature characters who were conditioned by where they came from: Trevor seemed to experience through them an imagined sense place of his own.</s>Sinn Féin Seanad leader Senator Rose Conway-Walsh led tributes in the Seanad to the late writer William Trevor. She wanted to “acknowledge the wonderful work he did in highlighting serious issues in our country”.

Ms Conway-Walsh recalled her role as an extra in The Ballroom of Romance, which was produced in Ballycroy, Co Mayo.

“William Trevor was responsible for my first pay cheque. We all received £18 per day. To a small, rural parish such as Ballycroy, it meant a lot.”

The Mayo Senator said the writer examined serious issues including rural Ireland. “He must be commended on the wonderful contribution he made to literature and Ireland as a whole.”

Labour Seanad leader Ivana Bacik described Trevor as “a beautiful writer of wonderful short stories that were really evocative of rural Ireland”.

Fine Gael Senator Joe O’Reilly said The Ballroom of Romance would be “a jewel for sociologists and historians for generations to come”.

“It evokes and depicts a very glum and dark period in Irish history. It is one we tend to romanticise retrospectively but it does not merit such romanticising.”

Independent Senator David Norris described Trevor as “a most modest, unassuming and charming man. He had a very sharply defined way of dealing with character in his short stories.

“I found some of the stories quite shocking. One of them was unbearable to read. It was about somebody who went away from a flat – I think it was in Brighton – and left the butler in charge. The butler gradually took over the flat. When he invited his friends in, they created devastation until the owner of the flat unexpectedly came back. I could hardly bear to read the last sentence.”

Mr Norris said Trevor “also illustrated the lives of the Protestant community in rural areas and small provincial towns”. He added “it is a moment to remember his quite extraordinary contribution to Irish literature”.
Novelist, playwright and short story writer William Trevor dies in Devon, England.