Nathan Thrall is an American writer living in Jerusalem. In 2024, he received the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. An international bestseller, it was translated into more than two dozen languages, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a best book of the year by over twenty publications, including The New Yorker, The Economist, and Time.
Thrall is also the author of the critically acclaimed essay collection The Only Language They Understand. His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books and has been cited in the United Nations Security Council, General Assembly, and Human Rights Council, as well as in reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories.
Thrall has received grants and fellowships from the Open Society Foundations, Middlebury College Language Schools, and The Writers’ Institute. His books have been longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize and the PEN Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, selected as a finalist for The Moore Prize, and shortlisted for The Orwell Prize. His commentary is often featured in print and broadcast media, including the Associated Press, BBC, CNN, Democracy Now!, The Economist, Financial Times, The Guardian, The New York Times, PRI, Reuters, Time, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project, and has taught at Bard College.
