Lore Segal is an American novelist, translator, teacher, and author of children’s books and a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was born Lore Groszmann in 1928 in Vienna, the only child of solidly middle-class Jewish parents. Shortly after Hitler’s annexation of Austria, she was one of a group of five hundred Jewish schoolchildren quickly sent to England. For the next thirteen years, she lived in several countries and with many different families. After receiving her B.A. English Honors from the University of London in 1948, she went to live in the Dominican Republic, where she worked as a teacher, until her American quota allowed her to come to New York in May 1951. In 1961, she married an editor, David Segal, they had two children, Beatrice and Jacob, before his sudden death in 1970. Her first significant publication, the novelistic autobiography Other People’s Houses, based on her experience as a refugee, was published in 1964 and serialized in The New Yorker. In 1965 she received the Guggenheim fellowship in creative writing followed by the National Council on the Arts and Humanities grant in 1967 and the Creative Artists Public Service Program grant in 1972. Lore Segal’s novels include Lucinella (1976), Her First American (1985) winner of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award and the Pulitzer finalist Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2008). Segal’s short story “The Reverse Bug” was included in Best American Short Stories 1989 and was a 1990 O. Henry Prize-winner. Her stories “Other People’s Deaths” and “Making Good” won the O. Henry Prize in 2008 and 2010, respectively. She has also published eight children’s books, such as Tell Me a Mitzie (1970) winner of Children’s Spring Book Festival first prize and the American Library Association Notable Book designation, and The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless, Her Cat, winner of the New York Times Notable Book designation, 1985. She had translated Gallow Songs of Christian Morgenstern (1967) The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm (1973) The Book of Adam to Moses (1987) and The Story of King Saul and King David (1991). Segal has held teaching appointments at Columbia University, Princeton University, Bennington College, Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Illinois at Chicago and Ohio State University and has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and The New Republic. Her latest novel Half the Kingdom, was published in 2013.
