William Trevor Biography
William Trevor was born on May 24, 1928, in Mitchelstown, County
Cork, in the Republic of Ireland. He grew up in various provincial towns and
attended a number of schools, graduating from Trinity College, in Dublin, with a
degree in history. He first exercised his artistry as a sculptor, working as a
teacher in Northern Ireland and then emigrated to England in search of work
when the school went bankrupt. He could have returned to Ireland once he became
a successful writer, he said, "but by then I had become a wanderer, and one way
and another, I just stayed in England ... I hated leaving Ireland. I
was very bitter at the time. But, had it not happened, I think I might never
have written at all."
In 1958 Trevor published his first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, to
little critical success. Two years later, he abandoned sculpting completely,
feeling his work had become too abstract, and found a job writing copy for a
London advertising agency. 'This was absurd,' he said. 'They would give me
four lines or so to write and four or five days to write it in. It was so
boring. But they had given me this typewriter to work on, so I just started
writing stories. I sometimes think all the people who were missing in my
sculpture gushed out into the stories.' He published several short stories,
then his second and third novels, which both won the Hawthornden Prize (established in 1919 by Alice Warrender and named after William Drummond of Hawthornden, the Hawthornden Prize is one of the UK's oldest literary awards). A number
of other prizes followed, and Trevor began working full-time as a writer in
1965.
Since then, Trevor has published over 40 novels, short story collections,
plays, and collections of nonfiction.
He has won three Whitbread Awards, a PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 1977 Trevor was awarded an honorary CBE
(Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services
to literature. Since he began writing, William Trevor regularly spends half the
year in Italy or Switzerland, often visiting Ireland in the other half. His home
is in Devon, in South West England, on an old mill surrounded by 40 acres of
land.
This biography was last updated on 08/02/2011.
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