The graphic novel Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD, 2024) by Tessa Hulls has won the Pulitzer Prize, announced on May 5. This prestigious award, widely considered the most prestigious in journalism, literature, and music in the US and second only to the Nobel Prize internationally, marks a significant achievement for Hulls and the field of comics.
Feeding Ghosts is only the second graphic novel to ever win the Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992, which received a Special Award. Remarkably, Feeding Ghosts competed in the regular category of Memoir or Autobiography, triumphing over the best English prose in the world. This victory is even more impressive as it is Hulls' debut graphic novel.
The Pulitzer Prize Board described Feeding Ghosts as "An affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – the author, her mother and grandmother, and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories." The book, which took nearly a decade to create, traces the impact of Chinese history across three generations, focusing on Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist who fled to Hong Kong after the 1949 Communist victory. Sun Yi wrote a best-selling memoir about her persecution and survival but later suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.
Hulls herself grew up witnessing her mother and grandmother struggle with unexamined trauma and mental illness. She initially coped by traveling to remote parts of the world, but eventually returned to confront her own fears and traumas. In an interview last month, Hulls stated, "I didn’t feel like I had a choice. My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this. My book is called Feeding Ghosts, because that was the beginning of this nine-year process of really stepping into something that was my family duty."
Despite this monumental achievement, the news of Feeding Ghosts winning the Pulitzer has received surprisingly little coverage. Since the announcement two weeks ago, only a few mainstream and trade publications, such as the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, along with one major comic book news outlet, Comics Beat, have reported on it.
Hulls has expressed that this may be her first and last graphic novel. In another interview, she explained, "I learned that being a graphic novelist is really too isolating for me. My creative practice relies on being out in the world and responding to what I find there." On her website, she announces her intention to become an embedded comics journalist, working with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits in remote environments.
Whatever the future holds for this groundbreaking artist, Feeding Ghosts deserves recognition and celebration beyond the world of comics, acknowledging its profound impact and artistic merit.
