Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.
Updated May 7
Journalist and Bay Area native Nathan Thrall won a Pulitzer Prize on Monday for his 2023 nonfiction book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy.”
In its citation, the Pulitzer Prize Board called the book a “finely reported and intimate account of life under Israeli occupation of the West Bank, told through a portrait of a Palestinian father whose five-year-old son dies in a fiery school bus crash when Israeli and Palestinian rescue teams are delayed by security regulations.”
Thrall, a Jerusalem resident and the former director of the International Crisis Group’s Arab-Israeli project, grew up in Berkeley and on the Peninsula. He is currently in Germany, according to his X account, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Investigative reporter Peter Waldman was named a finalist, along with several of his colleagues at Bloomberg News, in the explanatory reporting category for what the Pulitzer board called a “rigorous” series about corporate water profiteers. Waldman, who lives in San Francisco and is a member of J.’s board of directors, conceived of the series and reported stories from California’s Central Valley and Dakar, Senegal.
“Over time drought is going to be an increasing problem, and the water supply is going to be increasingly scarce,” Waldman told J. “What we focused on was what are the systems to ensure the most equitable and sustainable water supply, and prevent powerful investors with lots of money from diverting water.”
In other categories, the New York Times won for its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war, and Reuters won for its photographs of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and its immediate aftermath.
The Pulitzer board recognized all of the journalists covering the war with a special citation. “Under horrific conditions, an extraordinary number of journalists have died in the effort to tell the stories of Palestinians and others in Gaza,” it wrote. “This war has also claimed the lives of poets and writers among the casualties. As the Pulitzer Prizes honor categories of journalism, arts, and letters, we mark the loss of invaluable records of the human experience.”
“A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” Thrall’s second book, came out just a few days after the Oct. 7 attack. The timing and heightened sensitivity around discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turned the book, and its author, into a cause celebre. Several of Thrall’s book tour events were canceled due to security concerns, including one organized by the Los Angeles nonprofit Writers Bloc.
“There’s an atmosphere that is wholly intolerant of any expression of sympathy for Palestinians living under occupation, any discussion of the root causes of the conflict,” Thrall told the Guardian in October. “My book is not a polemic. It’s been praised for showing characters, both Jewish and Palestinian, in an empathetic way. For events around that sort of a book to be canceled, and ads for that sort of a book to be withdrawn, is outrageous.”
Thrall and Salama were scheduled to appear together at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Oct. 30, but Salama returned to his family in Anata, a town in the West Bank, after the Israel-Hamas war broke out. The JCC went ahead with the event, and Thrall discussed his process of reporting and writing the book with UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism professor Mark Danner.
Danner asked Thrall why Salama trusted him to share his family’s traumatic story with the world.
“Abed was with me for the first few weeks [of the book tour], and he was asked this question many times,” Thrall replied. “Many people around him were asking him that very question as I was spending time with him: Who is this guy? Why are you spending so much time with him? What are you telling him? Does he work for the Israelis? And he basically said, ‘I saw Nathan cry with me, we grieved together, and I trusted him right away.’”
Thrall noted that his status as an “outsider” to Palestinian society allowed him to gather information through interviews and write the book.
“Palestinian society is so tightly knit, if a Palestinian journalist were to come to Abed, he would immediately know how many degrees of separation there are between them, who he may know within his extended family, and he would be very reluctant to tell him the kinds of things that he told me,” he said.