Mosab Abu Toha

Mosab Abu Toha is one of his generation’s leading exponents of Palestinian poetry. Founder and director of the Edward Said Public Library, Gaza’s first English-language library, he has a degree in English Philology and has worked for UNRWA as a teacher in the city of his birth. In 2019, he was visiting poet at the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. His book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (in Spanish, Cosas que tal vez halles ocultes en mi oído, Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 2022), which describes his experiences during several sieges of Gaza, has received several prizes, among them the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award, and the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, as well as being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Awards in the United States. Abu Toha is also author of Forest of Silence (Kopf, 2024), a collection in which he depicts scenes from his everyday and family life in times of peace and in times of the horror of war and occupation. He has worked with Arrowsmith Press, The Nation, and Literary Hub, and has published poems in magazines including Poetry Magazine, Banipal, Solstice, The Markaz Review, The New Arab, and Peripheries.