Best commentary in any medium on international news
AWARD YEAR: 2023
AWARD NAME: The Flora Lewis Award 2023
RECIPIENT: Mosab Abu Toha
AFFILIATION: The New Yorker
HONORED WORK: “Essays on Gaza”
Mosab Abu Toha’s essay “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza,” takes readers on a harrowing odyssey through a besieged enclave experiencing widescale death, destruction, and
humanitarian collapse. He calmly recounts the Israeli bombing of his family home, the deaths of extended family members, the mass migration of frightened residents, the shortage of food, an endless queue for gas rations, a hospital strewn with patients and corpses, and his own temporary detention, interrogation, and beating as a suspected Hamas terrorist. With his poet’s gift of sparse, measured words, notably absent of vitriol, Abu Toha is a Palestinian voice from inside Gaza evoking the fear, desperation, and misery – but also the humanity – of a people determined to survive one of the most intense onslaughts of urban warfare in modern history.
Links to the winning work:
“The View from My Window in Gaza”
“The Agony of Waiting for a Ceasefire That Never Comes”
“Unsafe Passage”
Citation for Excellence:
Masha Gessen
The New Yorker
“Inside the Israeli Crackdown on Speech”
“In the Shadow of the Holocaust”