Pulitzer Winner 'Feeding Ghosts' Met With Silence

Tessa Hulls' graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts (MCD, 2024), has won a Pulitzer Prize, as announced on May 5.

This marks only the second time a graphic novel has received this honor. The first was Art Spiegelman's Maus, which earned a Special Award in 1992. Feeding Ghosts, however, triumphed in the standard Memoir or Autobiography category, competing directly against the finest English-language prose. Adding to the achievement, this is Hulls' debut work in the medium.

Widely regarded as the most prestigious award in American journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer Prize's international renown is surpassed only by the Nobel Prize.

This is a monumental accomplishment and arguably the biggest news in the comics world this year. Surprisingly, however, the story has received very little coverage. In the two weeks since the win, only a few mainstream and trade publications—notably the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly—and a single major comics news outlet, Comics Beat, have reported on it.

Described by the Pulitzer Prize Board 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 was nearly a decade in the making, according to Hulls.

Feeding Ghosts explores the reverberations of modern Chinese history across three generations. Hulls' grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist caught in the upheaval following the Communist victory in 1949. After escaping to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, only to later suffer a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Hulls witnessed both her mother and grandmother struggling under the weight of unaddressed trauma and mental illness. In response, Hulls left home to travel to some of the world's most remote places. Ultimately, she returned to confront her own fears and the generational haunting, realizing it could only be healed through familial love.

“I didn’t feel like I had a choice. My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this,” Hulls explained in a recent interview. “My book is called Feeding Ghosts because that was the beginning of this nine-year process of truly stepping into what felt like my family duty.”

Despite its success, this debut may also be her last graphic novel. “I learned that being a graphic novelist is too isolating for me,” she noted in another interview. “My creative practice relies on being out in the world and responding to what I find there.” On her website, she states she is “setting out to become an embedded comics journalist working with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits in remote environments.”

Whatever path this groundbreaking artist chooses next, Feeding Ghosts is a work that deserves recognition and celebration, both within the comics community and far beyond it.