Pulitzer Prize Winner Mosab Abu Toha weaves a devastating memoir with stealth reporting, turning headlines into human stories.
As the Human Rights Watch publishes its recent report on the ongoing extermination of Palestinian citizens across Gaza and The West Bank, this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary was being awarded to Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha.
Toha’s essays, published in The New Yorker, pierce through the static of headlines and policy briefs, laying bare the intimate, daily truths of living in Gaza — a place where survival is stitched together by memory and masked resistance.
With unflinching honesty and lyrical depth, Toha invites the world into the rhythm of life under siege. The Pulitzer committee praised his ability to merge “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir,” illuminating the Palestinian experience not just as news, but as human narrative — detailing heartbreak, breath, and survival.
At the heart of Abu Toha’s writing is a paradox; a chronical of poetic destruction. His essays are not abstract appeals but rather, records of loss etched with the names of loved ones, homes, books, gardens. His words reveal a Gaza that we seldom see — not as a site of devastation, but as a place of childhood, of libraries, of birds that still sing after the bombs fall.
His award-winning commentary mourns the silences of the living — the absence of justice, the absence of the familiar, and the unrelenting presence of fear. Yet within this sorrow, there is fierce beauty. As Toha once said in an interview:
“Poetry helps me survive. It is where I can breathe when the air is thick with smoke.”
From his celebrated debut collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza — a winner of the Palestine Book Award and the American Book Award — Toha writes not only of war, but of what remains:
“In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die.
Every time a bomb falls,
every time shrapnel hits our graves,
every time the rubble piles up on our heads,
we are awakened from our temporary death.”
The stanza holds as a philosophy of resilience. It’s a testament to a people who refuse erasure.
In another piece, he memorialises the quietest of goodbyes, the kind that war so cruelly demands:
“You were so small in my hands
no shrapnel could hit you, but the dust and
smoke of the bomb
rushed into your lungs.
No need for any gauze.
They just closed your eyes.
No need for any shroud.
You were already
in your swaddle blanket.”
This verse, passed from reader to reader across the world, became a symbol of the unbearable cost of war on Gaza’s children — and of the quiet grace with which Toha pens grief.
Following the announcement of his Pulitzer win, Abu Toha humbly acknowledged the moment:
“It hurts to win a big prize while the suffering which I wrote about in the winning work continues. It is my biggest hope that this achievement and recognition will be a step toward greater understanding of the decades-long plight of the Palestinian people and that it will inspire people, especially those in power, to act and put an end to this tragedy.”
Toha’s work will endure not because it documents bombs or borders, but because it insists on presence — that of his mother’s voice, a swaddle blanket, a rusting key, of a people who “cannot completely die.”
In the tradition of Mahmoud Darwish and Naomi Shihab Nye, Toha’s voice now takes its rightful place in the global literary canon — not as a victim’s lament, but as a survivor’s song.
