LORE SEGAL
March 8, 1928–October 7, 2024

The New Press is deeply saddened to note the passing of Lore Segal, a master storyteller known for her wit and keen eye, who died on October 7 at the age of ninety-six.

Segal’s short story collection Shakespeare’s Kitchen, which was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in fiction, was also a “Best Fiction” selection of The Washington Post, a favorite book of the year in the Chicago Tribune, #2 on Entertainment Weekly’s “Best Fiction Book of 2007” list, and a best book of the year in Public Arts.

Segal was also the author of Her First American, about which The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Lore Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing the Great American Novel.”

Segal and her family emigrated to the United States in 1951.  In Segal’s semi-autobiographical first novel, Other People’s Houses, which was published to international acclaim in 1964 and first republished in paperback by The New Press in 1994, a ten-year-old girl leaves Vienna nine months after the Nazi occupation of Austria aboard a children’s transport that takes her and several hundred children to safety in England. For the next seven years she lives in “other people’s houses,” the homes of the wealthy Orthodox Jewish Levines, the working-class Hoopers, and two elderly sisters in their formal Victorian household. Other People’s Houses won the Clifton Fadiman award, and Richard Gilman, writing in The New Republic, called it “an immensely impressive, unclassifiable book.”

Segal was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and her accolades include numerous O. Henry Prizes, a Grawemeyer Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and The National Council for the Arts and Humanities, among others.

In addition to her five adult novels, Segal wrote a number of children’s books, including the much beloved Tell Me a Mitzi, and an adaptation of Grimm’s fairy tales, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, published as The Juniper Tree.

Read a New York Times tribute to Lore Segal here and an obituary here.