Writer excelled at short stories
Irish novelist and playwright William Trevor, a master of short stories that often explored life’s disappointments, died Monday at the age of 88 in his adopted English home, his publisher says.
Trevor set his tales mainly in his native Ireland or in England, where he had lived since graduating from Trinity College Dublin in 1952. He won one of Britain’s top literary prizes, the Whitbread, three times; was shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize, most recently in 2002 for The Story of Lucy Gault; and was a perennial object of speculation as a potential Nobel literature laureate.
But Trevor studiously avoided the spotlight, even in his own works, where his voice melted away into the inner worlds of his often scar red, socially isolated protagonists.
“My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so,” Trevor told one interviewer. “I am a storyteller.”
Graham Greene praised Trevor’s 1973 collection Angels at the Ritz as the best set of short stories since Dubliners, James Joyce’s 1914 collection. While preferring the short story form, Trevor also was a novelist, playwright and TV dramatist.
He told The Guardian newspaper in 2009 he considered short stories the best vehicle for studying character.
“You can take a relationship and almost photograph it. And there it is,” he said. “Often that relationship can get lost in the bigger shape of the novel. I like to isolate it and really look at the characters.”
Born William Trevor Cox May 24, 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Trevor’s themes often seemed to reflect the difficulties of his early years, growing up with parents stuck in an unhappy marriage.