William Trevor

William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, and he spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev; and Felicia's Journey (1994), which won both the Whitbread Book of the Year and the Sunday Express Book of the Year awards. A celebrated short-story writer, William Trevor's latest collection, After Rain, is forthcoming in Penguin. He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989). He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are published by Penguin.

In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks' Prize, and in 1977 was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. Many critics and writers have praised his work: to Hilary Mantel he 'is one of the contemporary writers I most admire' and to Carol Shields 'a worthy chronicler of our times'. In the Spectator Anita Brookner wrote 'These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place,' and John Banville believes William Trevor's to be 'among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today'.