Children Of Dynmouth

PENGUIN DECADES

The Children of Dynmouth

William Trevor was born in 1928 in Mitchelstown, County Cork, and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, before moving to England in 1953. He worked as a sculptor, as a teacher and, briefly, in advertising before becoming a full-time writer. His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958. His subsequent novels have won many prizes, including The Old Boys (Hawthornden Prize), Fools of Fortune (Whitbread Fiction Award), The Silence in the Garden (Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award) and Felicia’s Journey (Whitbread Book of the Year Award), and he has also been shortlisted four times for the Booker Prize. His most recent novel is Love and Summer. Trevor is also a master short-story writer, acclaimed as ‘the greatest living writer’ of the form by John Banville. His Collected Stories were published in two volumes by Viking Penguin in 2009.

William Trevor was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in 1999, and received an honorary knight-hood in 2002 in recognition of his services to literature. He has lived in Devon for many years.

The Children of Dynmouth, published in 1976, was Trevor’s eighth novel. It won the Heinemann Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Roy Foster is Carroll Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Hertford College. His books include Modern Ireland 1600–1972, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, the two-volume authorized biography of W. B. Yeats (The Apprentice Mage, 1865–1914 and The Arch-Poet, 1915–1939) and most recently Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change 1970–2000.