Hollywood icon Martin Scorsese joins Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha to celebrate Pulitzer win

Renowned filmmaker Martin Scorsese was photographed with Mosab Abu Toha at a celebratory dinner last week in honour of the Gaza poet's Pulitzer Prize win for his searing essays on life under Israeli bombardment.

In an Instagram post shared Monday, Abu Toha said he had gone out with his wife and friends to mark the award when Scorsese surprised him by joining the gathering.

"Guess who made sure to join us to honour me and celebrate the Pulitzer Prize, even in the smallest way, as our families in Gaza starve and continue to be in danger? Well, there is only one Martin Scorsese," he wrote in the caption of a photograph of the two of them smiling.

"Martin made us laugh," he added, calling the director one of the people who gave him "the energy I needed to do everything, including the interview".

Scorsese, known for classics such as 'Goodfellas', 'The Wolf of Wall Street', and 'Shutter Island', has been praised for his quiet show of support.

Abu Toha was awarded the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his essays in The New Yorker, which document survival, memory, and displacement in Gaza. The Pulitzer board commended his work for blending "deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir" to convey the emotional and physical toll of over a year and a half of war.

After the award was announced, Abu Toha said he couldn't celebrate while Gaza remains under siege. Since October 2023, more than 61,700 Palestinians have been killed, most of them women and children, according to Gaza health authorities.

Now living in New York as a visiting scholar at Syracuse University, Abu Toha fled Gaza in late 2023 with his wife and three children. He had been detained, beaten, and interrogated by Israeli forces, describing the experience as "the most traumatising of my life".

His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The New York Review of Books, among others.

In 2017, he founded the Edward Said Library in Gaza City, the enclave’s first English-language library, which was bombed by Israeli forces in January.

His recent poetry collection, 'Forest of Noise', was written during the ongoing war. Though often described as a war poet, Abu Toha resists the label. "I would call it poetry of catastrophe - the loss of a girl, the loss of a father, the loss of a garden," he said.

Other Pulitzer winners this year include The New Yorker for its podcast on US military killings in Iraq and photojournalist Moises Saman for documenting the collapse of Syria’s Assad regime.