Much-lauded Irish novelist William Trevor dies at age 88

LONDON — Irish novelist and playwright William Trevor, a master of short stories that often explored life’s disappointments, has died at the age of 88 in his adopted English home, his publisher announced Monday.

[...] Mr. Trevor studiously avoided the spotlight, even in his own works, where his voice melted away into the inner worlds of his often scarred, socially isolated protagonists.

“My fiction may, now and again, illuminate aspects of the human condition, but I do not consciously set out to do so,” Mr. Trevor told one interviewer.

Graham Greene praised Mr. Trevor’s 1973 collection “Angels at the Ritz” as the best set of short stories since “Dubliners,” James Joyce’s 1914 collection.

Born William Trevor Cox on May 24, 1928, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Mr. Trevor’s themes often seemed to reflect the difficulties of his early years, growing up with parents stuck in an unhappy marriage.

Moving to London in 1960 to work in an advertising agency gave him enough free time to produce a second novel, “The Old Boys,” which won the Hawthornden Prize, honoring the “best work of imaginative literature.”

Daniel Murtagh, reviewing Mr. Trevor’s short story collection “The Hill Bachelors” in Commonweal magazine, said the editing paid off.

“One can open this book, pick a paragraph at random, and imagine dozens of ways Trevor could have written it less effectively and did not, ways he could have added, or failed to excise, a word or phrase that would have made it easier, more explicit, but less focused in its power to disturb or to force recognition,” Murtagh wrote.

Mr. Trevor won many honors, including the Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature for “Angels at the Ritz and Other Stories”; the Allied Irish Bank Prize for literature and the Heinemann Award for fiction in 1976; and the Whitbread Prize three times: in 1978 for “The Children of Dynmouth,” in 1983 for “Fools of Fortune” and in 1994 for “Felicia’s Journey.”

Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, Companion of Literature in 1994 and a knighthood in 2002.