William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. A celebrated short-story writer, his last collection, The Hill Bachelors, won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize. His most recent novel, The Story of Lucy Gault, was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award in 2002. In 1999 William Trevor received the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime's literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.