Lore Segal, prize-winning author and Pulitzer Prize finalist, dies aged 96

Lore Segal, the author of prize-winning short stories, novels, children’s books and translations died at the age of 96 on 7th October, her publisher Sort of Books has announced.

Segal, born in Austria in 1928, was dubbed a "monumental writer" by Kirkus, while the New York Times stated that "she has quietly produced some of the best fiction in American literature".

Natania Jansz of Sort of Books first met Lore Segal six years ago, after the publisher re-issued her 1964 novel, Other People’s Houses, an autofiction based on her experiences as a 10-year-old Kindertransport refugee, fleeing Nazi persecution in Vienna. Last year Sort of Books published her novella Ladies’ Lunch and Other Stories (2023) and, at the end of July, re-issued her 2007 Pulitzer-nominated novel, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, in a new edition, revised by the author, under the title An Absence of Cousins.

Jansz said: "Lore Segal was an extraordinary writer. You could sense on every page the workings of a uniquely sharp, yet compassionate, mind, absolutely in command of her craft. She was also an extraordinary person.  

"A few months ago, Zooming from her Upper West Side apartment, she confided that she was rapidly losing her sight. To allay my utter sadness, she offered this thought. She had emigrated before in her life and not by choice, yet each time had found this interesting… and now she was emigrating again."

Jansz added that for Lore, "interesting" was a special word, and for her meant an experience that could be transformed into a story.

She added: "Lore had an exceptional ability to find life ‘interesting’; to spin its accidents, griefs, quandaries into sentences that on the surface seemed mildly ironic, quirky even, yet which nailed devastating truths. She did this with astonishing wit and candour."

Her autobiographical novel, Other People’s Houses, recounts her experience of being placed by her Jewish parents on one of the first of Vienna’s Kindertransports in 1938. These Kindertransports saved Jewish children from Nazi persecution, by placing them in foster homes in England.

Jansz continued: "She notices the hectic flush behind her mother’s determined smile but instead fixes her mind on the adventure ahead. She was going to England! Grief could wait. Though only 10 years old, she was tasked to write on her arrival – to anyone who might sponsor her parents to leave Austria. Miraculously, she achieved this. A letter found its way to a refugee committee and visas (as "domestic servants") followed.

Lore stayed on in England after the war, studying at university in London, before emigrating, with her mother, to New York, by way of the Dominican Republic. There, she found work teaching, and in 1961 had her first Kindertransport stories (which she later turned into Other People’s Houses) published in the New Yorker. She would continue to be published by the magazine for six decades. And she would live in the same apartment, too: "I moved in the day of Kennedy’s funeral", she would tell visitors, who might also notice on their way in a drawing of Lore ’as a wild thing’ by her friend Maurice Sendak."

Jansz explained that "writing was a sustaining habit for Lore", adding: "She would show up at her desk from 8am to 1pm, to write, edit and revise her work – stories, novels, children’s books and translations from German – while raising two children, and teaching creative writing. The stories would find a home in the New Yorker (with a scattering in the Paris Review and other journals) and formed the kernels of her five novels. Her own favourite novel – which her former New Yorker editor, Bob Gottlieb, published at Knopf – was Her First American, which won an Academy Award in 1985. Like much of Lore’s work, it had strong autobiographical elements, being based on her relationship, as a young Jewish immigrant to New York, with the Black American sociologist, Horace Cayton Jr.

These stories formed her final collection, Ladies’ Lunch, about a group of elderly friends who meet to muse on, and laugh at, the enigmas and affronts of ageing. The first of these appeared when Lore turned 90, and she kept writing them into her final months. Jansz explained that Sort of Books helped her structure the collection in 2023, followed by Melville House Publishing in New York.

She added: "At 95, Lore was thrilled to find the book chosen by Barnes & Noble as a book of the month and splashed over storefront windows across Manhattan. She was also inducted into the US Academy of Arts and Letters (‘They took their time’, she commented)."

She continued: "Even then, the stories did not stop. In June this year, as Lore turned 96, the New Yorker published a new Ladies Lunch story, ’Beyond Imagining’. The group of old friends has become diminished by illness, forgetfulness and death and meet this head on, agreeing ‘without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances, on. They were going to die’. 

"As always, Lore was using stories to pave the way. When she wrote, in the calm, unadorned, truth telling way that she has, to inform us that she was no longer able to eat and drink, we steadied ourselves for our next Zoom meeting, and the sadness of farewells.

"We were wrong. While receiving hospice care at home, surrounded by her loving family, Lore was busy milling unpublished stories and edits in her mind. She had four short pieces she wished to share with us. She was finding it interesting."