Born William Trevor Cox in 1928 in County Cork, Ireland, to Irish Protestant parents, William Trevor spent his childhood in Ireland, where he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He has lived in Devon, England, however, since the early 1950s. Although many of his works are set in England, he belongs to the Irish Academy of Letters and considers himself an Irish author, a point on which he stands firm. That he has lived all his life on the margins of the dominant culture—a Protestant in Catholic Ireland, an Irish writer in England—is something Trevor considers a source of his artistic strength: “I was fortunate that my accident of birth actually placed me on the edge of things. I was born into a minority that all my life has seemed in danger of withering away” (Trevor, Memoirs, p. xiii). The artistic value, feels Trevor, lies in the perspective gained from observing a culture from a distance, which helps explain his early focus on English subjects and his later focus on Irish subjects, now that he has lived so long away from his homeland. Trevor is most widely known for his short stories, but his novels have also won high acclaim.
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