All this occupied his thoughts when he revisited the places of his war. Tramping over soil fed by the blood of men he had led and whose faces now stirred in his memory, it was his wife's response that came - as if in compensation for too little said before - when he wondered why his wandering had led him back to these old battlefields: in his sixty-ninth year he was establishing his survivor's status.

Despite having spent most of his life in England he considers himself to be "Irish in every vein". 2001: Irish Literature Prize
2002: Irish PEN Award
2002: The Story of Lucy Gault was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award
2003: Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award at the Listowel Writers' Week
2008: Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature


Legacies
A monument to Trevor – a bronze sculpture by Liam Lavery and Eithne Ring in the form of a lectern with an open book incorporating an image of the writer and a quotation as well as the titles of his three Whitbread Prize-winning works and two others of significance – was unveiled in Trevor's native Mitchelstown on 25 August 2004. Those who cannot accept the reality of their lives create their own alternative worlds into which they retreat.

William Trevor KBE (born 24 May 1928) is an Irish novelist playwright and short story writer. Tim Adams a staff writer for The Observer described him as "widely believed to be the most astute observer of the human condition currently writing in fiction".