It’s the birthday of William Trevor (1928-2016, #nicelonglife), highly celebrated Irish novelist and short story author, and by “highly celebrated” we mean he received loads of Whitbread Awards, and by “loads” we mean three. He wrote about ordinary Irish and English people “hanging on to the bottom rung of the lower middle class” in dark but funny stories.

NB: Trevor has often been mentioned in the same breath as Chekhov. (There. It happened again.)

William Trevor Cox was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, to a Protestant family in largely Catholic territory; this taught him to be a quiet observer. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1950 and taught first at a prep school in Northern Ireland and then at schools in England, working as a sculptor on the side. His first novel, A Standard of Behavior (1958), sank like a stone, and he worked as a copywriter, at which he was evidently terrible, but the job allowed him time to write fiction. His next novel, The Old Boys (1964), a macabre, humorous tale about a school reunion, was a big hit with the critics and won the Hawthornden Prize, and Trevor’s career as a Significant Literary Force took off.

Trevor went on to write 17 more novels and 20 collections of short stories; he considered short stories to be his main strength, though many of his novels won top literary awards. He was highly sympathetic to his characters, who tended to be oddballs and outcasts caught up in bleak circumstances. The Whitbread winners: The Children of Dynmouth (1976), Fools of Fortune (1983), and Felicia’s Journey (1994, Whitbread Book of the Year). Other notable titles: Reading Turgenev (1991), The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), and the story collections The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, and Other Stories (1967) and The Ballroom of Romance, and Other Stories (1972).

(Somehow I’ve missed out on reading this author, but if he’s darkly funny, I’m in. Just placed a library hold on The Day We Got Drunk on Cake.)

Trevor died in his sleep at the age of 88, survived by his wife of many years, Jane Ryan, and their two sons. (See an obituary here.)

Have sympathetic start to this green, muted Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.