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. 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.”

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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. He was perhaps unusual in maintaining something of an equal commitment to both the novel and the short-story form during his writing life. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. “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. 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. 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. Many of his books are dedicated to Jane, others to their sons Patrick and Dominic.
Novelist, playwright and short story writer William Trevor dies in Devon, England.