William Trevor has become one of my favourite authors. He was born in County Cork in Ireland in 1928 but moved to England in his twenties and remained there until his death in 2016 at the age of 88. He was nominated five times for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize (far superior to the Booker in my opinion, and now the Costa Prize) three times.
His first success came in 1964 with The Old Boys (on my to read list) and he moved to Devon where he resided for the rest of his life. Felicia's Journey (a 1994 Whitbread winner) is one of my favourite books and I also enjoyed the award winning The Children of Dynemouth, Fools of Fortune and the nominated The Story of Lucy Gault.
Trevor is hugely admired for his short stories and there are a number of collections. I'm not a huge lover of this format and his News from Ireland collection my only book so far. I also enjoyed My House in Umbria, the first of the two novellas that make up Two Lives and shall pick up the other, Reading Turgenev sometime soon.
In 1977 Trevor was awarded an honorary CBE and in 2002 came an honorary KBE. In his obituary in The Guardian, Peter Porter ended with:
Ireland remained close to his heart, but I am convinced that he reserved his best writing for his adopted land, England. One of the great creators of fiction of recent decades, he was not modern, but neither was he reactionary. Every sentence he wrote was perfectly crafted, yet he had a natural love of storytelling: his first loyalty was always to the reader’s desire to find out what was going to happen next. It is hard to conceive of an English-speaking literary landscape without him.
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