The Irish short story writer and novelist, William Trevor, passed away at the age of eighty-eight, reports his publisher, Penguin Random House Ireland.

Trevor published over thirty novels and story collections during his career. Though The Old Boys was his second published novel, he considered the 1962 book his true debut. Four of his novels—The Story of Lucy Gault, Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, Reading Turgenev, and The Children of Dynmouth—were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The Guardian reported, “In a 1975 review of William Trevor’s short-story collection Angels at the Ritz, Graham Greene described it as ‘one of the best collections, if not the best since James Joyce’s Dubliners.’”

He was awarded a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1977 for his services to literature, and was made a Companion of Literature in 1994. In 2002, he received an honorary knighthood.

Talking to The New Yorker in 1982, Trevor said, “Each character is somebody that I know very well—as well as I know myself. You become very interested in that person. You become immensely inquisitive and immensely curious. I’m sort of a predator, an invader of people.”

The Paris Review interviewed Trevor in 1989 for its Art of Fiction Series. Among his many wonderful responses, Trevor said: “I liked teaching math best because I don’t have a natural way with figures and therefore had sympathy with the children who didn’t either. And I greatly respected the ones who did possess that aptitude. My skill in art and English made me impatient, and I found those subjects rather dreary to teach as a result. ‘Why are the art room walls covered with pictures of such ugly women?’ a headmaster asked me once. ‘And why have some of them got those horrible cigarette butts hanging out of their nostrils?’ I explained that I had asked the children to paint the ugliest woman they could think of. Unfortunately, almost all of them had looked no further than the headmaster’s wife. I like that devilish thing in children.”

Photo Credit: Jane Brown