William Trevor

Born William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, to a Protestant bank-official father whose postings dragged the family through a string of small Irish towns, Trevor studied at Trinity College Dublin, worked briefly as a sculptor and schoolteacher, and moved to England in the 1950s, supporting himself for years writing advertising copy before fiction took over.

He became, above all, a short-story writer, compared constantly to Chekhov for his compassion toward failure, loneliness, and the small defeats of ordinary lives, across decades of acclaimed collections. Fools of Fortune (1983), among his most celebrated novels, follows an Anglo-Irish family destroyed across three generations by a single act of violence during the War of Independence.

He kept writing from rural Devon into his eighties, an adopted Englishman permanently fixated on Ireland as his true subject, winning three Whitbread Awards and near-constant Booker recognition. He died in Devon in 2016.