Trevor's greatest skill is seamless characterisation: words that appear authorial are actually those of his protagonists
William Trevor was born in County Cork in 1928 and has lived in England since the 1950s. He gave up sculpture when he turned 30, became a copywriter, and wrote his first two novels and several stories largely on company time. These stories, composed "on a battered Remington typewriter in an office corridor in London" and set in England, were "driven by curiosity about the unfamiliar".