Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his searing essays in The New Yorker that chronicle life under Israeli bombardment in Gaza and reflect on memory, survival, and exile.
The Pulitzer board praised Abu Toha’s writing for combining “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir” to convey the emotional and physical toll of more than a year and a half of war. His essays, drawn from firsthand experience and reflections on his family’s suffering, offer a rare and humanising perspective on Palestinian life under siege.
“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha wrote on X. “Let it bring hope / Let it be a tale.”
In an interview with Democracy Now! following the announcement, Abu Toha said he was grateful for the recognition but could not celebrate.
“My sisters, my brothers and my parents in Gaza are starving,” he said. “The only celebration for me is when there is an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and the West Bank, and when justice and peace are served in Palestine.”
Abu Toha, 32, now resides in Syracuse, New York, where he is a visiting scholar at Syracuse University. He fled Gaza in late 2023 with his wife and three children after being detained, beaten, and interrogated by Israeli forces.
“It was the most traumatising experience of my life,” he told The New Arab in December. He described being blindfolded and held with 200 other civilians in inhumane conditions. “It was painful to have to sit on your knees for three days, except for when you go to the toilet once a day.”
Bearing witness
Despite his growing international recognition, Abu Toha remains grounded in his responsibility to bear witness. “I have the responsibility to share whatever I know that is happening,” he said.
“I’m amplifying the voices and the stories, not only the poems themselves but the stories behind these poems… It is witness poetry,” he continued.
In the same interview, he recalled a defining moment from 2014, when a photo of him standing among rubble in Gaza holding a copy of The Norton Anthology of American Literature went viral.
“The role of a poet or an artist,” he said, “is to accompany people who have never been able to go to that place—to take them into the heart of the experience.”
Since 2014, Abu Toha’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others.
He founded the Edward Said Library in Gaza City in 2017, which was bombed by Israeli forces in January. The library was the enclave’s first one in the English language, and was popular among locals.
He has published two collections of poetry. His latest, Forest of Noise, was written during Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.
He said the title reflects the unrelenting violence: “The noise of the F-16s, the drones, the gunboats, the helicopters, the tanks, the shelling, the airstrikes, the screaming of death…”
Yet his writing is also filled with longing for what has been lost – not only people, but gardens, the sea, clouds, football matches with friends.
“To so many people, what matters is what happens after the airstrike,” he said. “But we don’t usually focus on what was happening before – what people were holding onto before everything was lost.”
Abu Toha rejects the label of “war poet”. What he documents, he says, is not war, but catastrophe. “I would call it poetry of catastrophe – the loss of a girl, the loss of a father, the loss of a garden.”
This year’s Pulitzer winners also included The New Yorker itself, honoured for its investigative podcast on US military killings of Iraqi civilians and for photojournalist Moises Saman’s images documenting the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
