Mosab Abu Toha, the acclaimed Palestinian poet and author, has won a Pulitzer Prize this year. He has been named the winner for his powerful series of essays in The New Yorker, chronicling life and loss in Gaza, where he has spent most of his life.
“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha announced on X. “Let it bring hope / Let it be a tale.”
The award comes in the 18th month of Israel’s war on besieged Gaza, which has killed more than 52,000 Palestinians.
Abu Toha, 32, quoted from the poem of the late Palestinian author Refaat Alareer who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Shujayia in southern Gaza, along with his brother, sister, and four of her children. As a professor of English literature, Alareer dedicated his career to nurturing Palestinian literature under occupation. He championed young voices through the We Are Not Numbers project, launched after Israel’s 2014 offensive. The aim of the initiative was to resist the dehumanising reduction of Palestinians to statistics.
Commenting on the win, the Pulitzer board praised Abu Toha’s “essays on the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel.”
In his essays, Abu Toha reflects on his family’s struggle to find food under siege, interwoven with tender memories of ordinary meals before the war. The committee recognised four essays by Abu Toha: one exploring his memories of a now-destroyed landscape; another about the Jabalia refugee camp; one about the struggle to find food in Gaza; and another about his experiences facing special scrutiny while traveling since arriving in the United States.
“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.
Born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp, Abu Toha came of age under blockade and bombardment. From Gaza, he became one of the most powerful literary voices of his generation.
Today, he is a father, a scholar, and a poet whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. His first poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (2022), was awarded both the Palestine Book Award and the American Book Award.
From Gaza’s siege to Harvard’s halls
After earning a bachelor’s degree in English from the Islamic University of Gaza, Abu Toha taught English in UNRWA schools, which lasted about three years.
In 2014, moved by a book he pulled from the rubble of a bombed building, he founded the Edward Said Library in Beit Lahia—Gaza’s first English-language library. Noam Chomsky called the library “a rare flicker of light and hope for the young people of Gaza.” A second branch opened in Gaza City in 2019, offering a rare cultural refuge amid war.
That same year, Abu Toha became a visiting scholar at Harvard University through the Scholar-at-Risk program. He worked as a librarian at Houghton Library and held a fellowship at the Harvard Divinity School.
In 2023, he earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Syracuse University, where he was later appointed to the faculty.
Detained, abused, freed
The same year, Abu Toha was detained by Israeli forces at a checkpoint while attempting to flee Beit Lahia in northern Gaza with his wife, Maram, and their three young children.
They fled to Jabaliya refugee camp after Israeli forces warned of imminent strikes. But soon, that camp, too, was targeted—an airstrike hit just seventy meters from where they were sheltering.
Toha lost 31 members of his family in a single Israeli airstrike on their house in Gaza City on October 13, 2023, including two first cousins, their husbands, and all their children. Their home in Beit Lahia was also bombed on October 28, 2023.
With no home to return to, Abu Toha sought to evacuate. He had been told by American officials that he and his family, including his US-citizen son, would be permitted to cross into Egypt via Rafah. But before they could reach the border, Israeli forces intercepted them.
However, even before reaching Rafah border, Israeli forces detained him at a checkpoint as he attempted to leave the north of Gaza for the south to reach Rafah border.
“Soldiers separated me from my family, beat me, and interrogated me,” he later wrote. He was eventually released and allowed to leave for the US after international friends and advocates pressured for his freedom.
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian-Canadian lawyer, told Time magazine, conveying an account from Abu Toha's wife that “He was forced to put his son down…They were all forced to walk with their hands raised in the air. He raised his arms in the air… [and he and] around 200 others were taken out of this line and abducted.”
On November 20, The New Yorker’s Michael Luo confirmed Abu Toha’s detention. PEN America and PEN International issued urgent calls for his release. A day later, Democracy Now! reported that he had been freed from an Israeli prison in the Negev.
Beaten, hospitalised, and eventually permitted to leave Gaza, Abu Toha also carried grief with him. He mourned the loss of his friend Refaat Alareer. “He is someone who didn’t want to die,” Abu Toha told Democracy Now! in January. “His body is still under the rubble.”
He remembered Refaat not only for his poetry but for their shared joy— “picking strawberries and exchanging jokes on campus.”
It is in Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” that Abu Toha finds a line of prophecy and resistance. “In his poem ‘If I Must Die,’ he didn’t say, ‘If I die.’ ‘If I must die,’ if my death was a necessity, ‘Let it be a hope. Let it be a tale. Let it bring hope.’ And it’s really very, very, very sympathetic and very, very beautiful to see that many people around the world are reading his poem and flying his kite.”
Then he added: “And I’m sure that Refaat is outside now, seeing — I mean, although his body is still under rubble, but his spirit, his soul is watching everything. He is watching the kites that are flying in the sky of the free world. And I think, I believe, that his only hope right now is that these kites will fly over Gaza to protect the children and mothers and fathers and everyone in Gaza from the Israeli airstrikes.”
