William Trevor

William Trevor Cox (24 May 1928 – 20 November 2016), known by his pen name William Trevor, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.Trevor won the Whitbread Prize three times and was nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which was also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name was also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature. He won the 2008 International Nonino Prize in Italy. In 2014, Trevor was bestowed Saoi by the Aosdána.Trevor resided in England from 1954 until his death at the age of 88. He was born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, to a middle-class, Anglo-Irish Protestant (Church of Ireland) 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 a succession of schools including St Columba's College, Dublin (where he was taught by Oisín Kelly) and at Trinity College Dublin, from which he received a degree in history. Trevor worked as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox after he graduated from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He married Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrated to England, working as a teacher, a sculptor and then as a copywriter for an advertising agency. During this time he and his wife had their first son. In 1952 he became an art teacher at Bilton Grange, a prep school near Rugby. Trevor was commissioned to carve reliefs for several churches, including All Saints, Braunston, Northamptonshire. In 1956 he moved to Somerset to work as a sculptor and carried out commissions for churches. He stopped wood carving in 1960.

His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958 (by Hutchinson of London), but received little critical success. He later disowned this work, and, according to his obituary in the Irish Times, "refused to have it republished". It was, in fact, republished in 1982 and in 1989.

In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. This success encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer.

In 1971, he and his family moved from London to Devon in South West England, first to Dunkeswell, then in 1980 to Shobrooke, where he lived until his death. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considered himself to be "Irish in every vein".William Trevor died peacefully in his sleep on 20 November 2016. He was 88 years old.