Lore Segal has passed away in New York at the age of 96
The Austrian-American writer and Holocaust survivor Lore Segal passed away in New York on the night of 7 October 2024.
Born Lore Groszmann on 8 March 1928 in Vienna, she was forced to leave her homeland at the age of ten, arriving in England on the first Kindertransport in December 1938, where she lived with a number of foster families.
She began writing at a very young age. After completing her Bachelor’s degree in English at the University of London in 1948, she went to live in the Dominican Republic before moving to New York in May 1951. She had two children with her husband, the editor David Segal, whom she raised with the help of her mother following his premature death in 1970. Between 1968 and 1996, she taught writing at the Columbia University School of the Arts, Princeton, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois and Ohio State University, from which she retired in 1996.
Lore Segal was also a well-known and highly respected novelist, essayist, translator and author of children’s books and has received the Clifton Fadiman Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Harold U. Ribalow Prize and a grant from the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Her reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and her stories in The New Yorker.
Many of her works have become classics: her short story “The Reverse Bug” was included in the Best American Short Stories in 1989 and was an O. Henry Prize-winner in 1990. Her stories “Other People's Deaths” and “Making Good” were included in the O. Henry Prize Stories in 2008 and 2010, respectively. Lore Segal’s novels include “Other People's Houses”, first published in The New Yorker, “Lucinella” and “Her First American”, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Her novel “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” was one of three finalists for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 2023, Lore Segal published “Ladies Lunch and Other Stories”. She was inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters in the same year.
At the end of May 2023, Lore Segal was invited by the National Fund to take part in a panel discussion at the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York as part of the opening of our exhibition “From Repression to Remembrance”. The panel also featured the publicist and translator Karin Hanta, who shone a light on Lore Segal’s experiences in connection with the culture of remembrance, exile, language and translation in her National Fund-funded book Zurück zur Muttersprache (Back to the Mother Tongue).
The Josefstadt District Museum is currently showing an exhibition “I wanted to love Vienna, but I didn't dare”, about the life and work of Lore Segal, co-funded by the National Fund. Featuring many personal exhibits, the show documents the fate of her family, Lore’s escape to England on the Kindertransport and reflections on her literary works, which were shaped by the Holocaust and exile. Lore Segal was able to take part in the opening ceremony via video link. The exhibition is on display until 26 January 2025.