William Trevor: The quiet chronicler of the lost and the damned

His reticent style and compassion for life's loners have won him a fourth Booker prize nomination. Can this unfashionable Irishman of letters finally take the crown?

Take a look at Irish contemporary fiction, and you see the shadow of James Joyce falling upon it. So many young writers feel a need to dazzle the readers, sometimes even puzzle and confuse them with the complexities of their ideas. Language becomes the leading character of the novel. Then there is the other Irish tradition, the one in which words are softer, quieter, more subtle. Where the magic steals up on you, weaving a far more seductive spell with its nuance and understatement. This is where William Trevor is the maestro – a man who, in the words of another, younger, Irish novelist, Joseph O'Connor, "says the most complicated things in a language that is as clear as a glass of water".

It is a talent which has brought Trevor all manner of awards: Whitbread prizes (three), the Hawthornden (one), an honorary CBE and a knighthood, and three Booker prize shortlistings. Last week he was shortlisted for the Booker again, competing against Rohinton Mistry, Carol Shields, Yann Martel, Sarah Waters and Tim Winton.

His shortlisted book, The Story of Lucy Gault, has won him many plaudits. It will no doubt sell well to the reading group aficionados, who like his peers, revere him for his spare, elegant prose, tightly woven plots and finely drawn characters. His short stories are acknowledged Chekhovian masterpieces. One, The Ballroom of Romance, not only became a well-known film, but its title has practically entered the language in Ireland as an ironic shorthand for – as O'Connor puts it – "the kind of dismal dump the country used to be".

Though Trevor, at 72, is of the six the grand old man of letters, his life is possibly the least known (there's certainly far less known about him than one woman notably not on the list, Zadie Smith). In this age of confessional writing and celebrity, he guards his privacy and keeps his distance. He turns down invitations to literary festivals, rarely gives readings, and does not indulge in trips to the Groucho Club.

His work, depicting an Ireland where people can be excluded and lonely, where there are tensions between Irish Protestant and Catholic, gives some insight into what has shaped him. In Fools of Fortune, the Anglo-Irish are forced to leave their large houses. In books like The Children of Dynmouth, The Love Department and Elizabeth Alone, he writes of poverty, the difficulties and compromises of relationships, lost opportunities and regrets, small communities and the forces of good and evil. And his writing has long focused on the hold of the past on the present. Yet Ireland is no longer home to him. He is a deliberate exile, forced out by his urge to write. "I couldn't write about Ireland if I lived there," he said recently. "I would be much too close."

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork in 1928. The Trevors were a Protestant family in a Catholic country. His father came from the south, his mother from the north. Mr Trevor senior worked as a bank manager and kept the family criss-crossing the country from one branch to another.

It was this nomadic childhood that may well have formed Trevor's empathy for outsiders. He writes of them often: thieves, conmen and murderers, the unwed and unloved. Felicia's Journey, published in 1994 and for which he won his third Whitbread, includes a chilling portrayal of a serial killer, while Death in Summer, published four years ago, was the account of an abused child who kidnaps a baby.

Brendan Kennelly, professor of modern literature at Trinity College, Dublin, sees Trevor as part of a long tradition in Ireland of the outsider, people who are "blow-ins" who don't belong in the village or the parish and remain on the edge of society. "He is a man who is interested in loneliness as a condition," thinks Kennelly. "It is something which many people in Ireland feel but don't always admit to. You see it in farmers and Trevor spots it in the Irish way of life."

Yet Trevor himself enjoys a happy, stable existence. He and his wife Jane live in a quiet Devon backwater; they have two grown-up sons. He has lived in Britain for more than 40 years, first coming here to work as a sculptor and then as a copywriter. It was his second novel, The Old Boys, which brought him literary esteem, winning the 1964 Hawthornden prize.

Few fellow writers have got to know him. Another former copywriter, the novelist Fay Weldon, used to encounter him frequently on trains as they both travelled to London from the West Country. "He was a fantastic train companion," she recalls. "He would talk about so many things, so eloquently. It was that old-fashioned sort of conversation, about books, the weather, the landscape, history. Yet at the end of the journey, even though we would talk all the way, I still knew nothing about him. He was courteous, affable, very private, and modest. It was the kind of modesty that comes from knowing you have nothing to prove."

Trevor has always preferred to travel by train or by boat, hating airports. He is not a man for modern ways. He hates computers too, preferring to write manually or on his old manual typewriter in the morning before working in his garden.

Kevin Myers, The Irish Times columnist who writes the paper's "Irishman's Diary", is among the recipients of Trevor's letters. He believes that while Seamus Heaney represents "sexy" Irishness, Trevor is the "unsexy" – unfashionable – Irish writer. "But he is greater than Heaney. In a century's time it is William Trevor who will be remembered, for his lucidity and clarity of purpose."

The praise for Trevor is not unanimous. The plot of his latest, Booker-shortlisted novel was criticised by some for being too fanciful; the heroine's parents, according to Trevor, believe her to be dead and so they leave Ireland, apparently forgetting all about her. While Trevor's ability as a short story teller remains undisputed – he is, says fellow novelist John Banville, "the master of the concentrated glance" – others think he has not kept in touch with modern Ireland, that he has failed to understand how it has changed.

But although he has chosen not to live in Ireland, Trevor still frequently visits. Earlier this year he received an award from Irish PEN, and travelled there to collect it. There were long, worthy speeches about his work. Trevor then stood up, and in 60 seconds thanked the organisers for the award, then sat down. By the time the applause had finished, he and his wife had slipped quietly away.

Much of his reluctance to talk about his work stems from a fear that by dissecting what he does, the magic will disappear. To him, writing is as much of a mystery that you accept as one might accept the mystery of God. To young writers, Trevor has been an inspiration. Fiction today need not be a fantasy, an odyssey of magic realism. It is, in the hands of a master, essentially an act of compassion.