The 32-year-old Abu Toha was arrested in 2023 by Israeli soldiers when he tried to escape from northern Gaza together with his wife and their three children. Soldiers "separated me from my family, beat and interrogated me", he writes. He managed, however, to get to the USA thanks to pressure from friends, according to The Guardian.
In his essays, he tells about his relatives' struggle to find food in Gaza, but also about the meals before the war. But he also writes about the suspicion towards Palestinians that he experiences outside his homeland.
Mosab Abu Toha "describes the physical and emotional bloodbath in Gaza", notes the Pulitzer jury, who thinks that he combines his reporting with the intimacy of memoir writing to convey the Palestinians' experience of the ongoing war.
The literary Pulitzer Prize went to Percival Everett for the novel "James" where Everett retells "Huckleberry Finn's adventures" from the perspective of the former slave.
