Writer of autobiographical novels and short stories drew on her experiences after fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna as part of the Kindertransport

Ella Creamer

Tue 8 Oct 2024 12.47 BST

Lore Segal, the Austrian-American writer of autobiographical novels and short stories drawing on her experience fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna for England as a Jewish refugee and later settling in the US, died on Monday aged 96.

In a distinctively wry and shrewd voice, her work explored themes of displacement, assimilation, race, memory and death.

Her work spanned five novels, 13 short stories – many of which were published in the New Yorker – four translations and eight children’s books. Her fourth novel, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in 2008.

Segal “was an extraordinary writer”, said Natania Jansz of Sort Of Books, Segal’s UK publisher. “You could sense on every page the workings of a uniquely sharp, yet compassionate, mind, absolutely in command of her craft”.

Segal was born in Vienna in 1928 as Lore Vailer Groszmann to a Jewish family. In December 1938, after Hitler annexed Austria in March, Segal fled to London as part of the Kindertransport, a British scheme designed to rescue predominantly Jewish children from Nazi persecution by relocating them to live with foster families in the UK.

In the UK, Segal lived with five different foster families. The experience informed her first novel, Other People’s Houses, published in 1964. She stayed in the UK after the war to study English literature at Bedford College, University of London.

With her mother, she moved to the Dominican Republic, where her uncle was waiting for a family visa to enter the US. In 1951, when the visa came through, Segal moved with her mother, uncle and grandmother to Washington Heights, New York.