Palestinian poet and author Mosab Abu Toha has won the Pulitzer Prize for his powerful essays published in The New Yorker, chronicling the physical and emotional toll of the ongoing war in Gaza. The award, announced Monday, honours an essay series the Pulitzer board described as combining “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience” of Israel's war on Gaza.
“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Mr Abu Toha wrote on Instagram. “Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale.”
His words were a tribute to his late friend and fellow Palestinian poet, Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza in December 2023. Mr Alareer's final poem was titled, “If I must die, let it be a tale.”
Mosab Abu Toha, 32, lived most of his life in Gaza. In 2023, he was detained by Israeli forces at a checkpoint while trying to flee Beit Lahia in northern Gaza with his wife, Maram, and their three children.
“In Israeli detention, soldiers separated me from my family, beat me, and interrogated me,” he wrote in one of his Pulitzer-winning essays in The New Yorker. He was later released following international pressure and made his way to the United States via Egypt.
"In the past year, I have lost many of the tangible parts of my memories – the people and places and things that helped me remember,” he wrote in another essay titled ‘The Gaza We Leave Behind'.
“I have struggled to create good memories. In Gaza, every destroyed house becomes a kind of album, filled not with photos but with real people, the dead pressed between its pages.”
His writings often intertwined his lived experience with scenes of devastation in Gaza, recalling visits to the Jabalia refugee camp and family gatherings over tea. “I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again,” he wrote in yet another piece.
Mr Abu Toha also spoke of other challenges faced by Palestinians abroad, recounting an encounter with US airport security. “I was kidnapped by the Israeli army in November, before being stripped of my clothes,” he told a TSA agent during a layover in Boston. “Today, you come and separate me from my wife and kids, just like the army did a few months ago.”
Pulitzer Prize winners are chosen by a board of journalists and scholars and announced annually at Columbia University. The New Yorker also won Pulitzers in other categories this year, including an investigative podcast on the killing of Iraqi civilians by US forces and Moises Saman's feature photography documenting the end of Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship in Syria.
