At a time when the news offers little other than tragic headlines and misery-packed reports, Mosab Abu Toha’s Pulitzer win feels like a breath of fresh air. The 32-year-old Palestinian author, who is originally from Gaza, was awarded this week for his series of works published inside American multi-platform publication The New Yorker.
In total, four pieces of writing were recognized: Requiem for a Refugee Camp, The Gaza We Leave Behind, The Pain of Traveling While Palestinian, and My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza. Each centered on the daily realities and suffering of the people of Gaza in the aftermath of the events of Oct. 7, 2023, Abu Toha’s poems were praised for their ability to “combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war,” the Pulitzer committee said in a statement.
I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.
Let it bring hope
Let it be a tale pic.twitter.com/VP6RsPY6vz— Mosab Abu Toha (@MosabAbuToha) May 5, 2025
“I have just won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary,” Abu Toha commented on his win on X. “Let it bring hope/ Let it be a tale,” he added.
Born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp, Abu Toha has long used poetry as a means of resistance; a form of survival through language in a place where erasure and cultural silencing are routine. Brought up amidst all the violence and rubble caused by occupying colonial forces, the recent laureate has used his voice, and pen, to document the toll of living under siege while much of the world continues to look away.
With words in many leading publications— including The Atlantic and The New York Review of Books— and experiences among some of the academic field’s most respected institutions such as Harvard and Syracuse, the young writer is slowly breaking into mainstream literary circles, bringing the Palestinian narrative to spaces that have long overlooked it.
To celebrate his life and work, below, we gathered five of our favorite poems penned by Abu Toha you must read.
my grandfather and home
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Memories Are Flowers
Memories are Flowers—
We water them,
narrate them,
turn them into poems
into plays,
into stories.
We decorate them with
light bulbs,
with metaphors
of different hues,
in variant clubs.
Some memories are nasty.
They have rank smells,
and coarse, prickly skin.
No matter how deeply
inhumed the bones,
the worm of sweet memories
shall find their way.
Untitled
A father wakes up at night, sees
the random colors on the walls
drawn by his four year old son.
But he’s dead after an airstrike.
The colors are about 4 feet high.
Next year, they would be 5 or 6.
But the painter is dead and the
museum has no new
paintings to show.
A Rose Shoulders Up
Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.
