William Trevor

The Irish writer William Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928, and worked as a teacher, sculptor, and advertising copywriter before turning to writing fiction full time. He went on to publish acclaimed novels including “The Old Boys,” “The Children of Drymouth,” “Fools of Fortune,” and “Felicia’s Journey,” but was best known for his short stories, nearly four dozen of which appeared in The New Yorker before he died, in 2016. In measured, sometimes wry, sometimes sombre tones, these immersive narratives follow a cast of characters that includes the farmers, clergy, shopkeepers, and office workers who inhabit the countryside, the cities, and what Stephen Schiff called the “backward villages in England and Ireland with narrow streets full of dogs and bicycles and small boys and nuns.” Though often blackly comical, they also explore with compassion the moral dilemmas faced by ordinary people. Among Trevor’s many awards and distinctions, he was knighted in 2002 and received the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature in 2008.