In one of the most stunning recent award wins for a graphic novel, Tessa Hulls’ Feeding Ghosts (MBD) has won the Pulitzer Prize in the Memoir or Autobiography category.
It is only the second graphic novel to won a Pulitzer….but the first to win in a regular category. In 1992 Art Spiegelman’s Maus won a special Pulitzer award to recognize its powerful message.
The prize committee wrote of Feeding Ghosts: “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.”
Hulls’ book follow three generation of Chinese women through the reverberations of history and personal trauma. Her grandmother was a journalist swept up in the Communist revolution who escapes to Hong Kong but suffers from a mental breakdown. Hulls tells her story and that of her mother and herself as they struggle to reckon with family and world history….and their own attempts to survive it. Told in a dense, woodcut like style, it’s a powerful work that has already won a load of awards including the National Books Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the 2025 Anisfield Wolf Prize, the Libby Award For Best Graphic Novel and the shortlist for the Carnegie Medal.
Regular readers of this site know that we hold graphic novels and non fiction to be literature of the highest order. It’s still exciting when an award as respected as the Pulitzers recognizes this as well, and especially with a book as strong as Feeding Ghosts.
The Pulitzer is annually awarded annually to a cartoonist, and this year’s winner was Ann Telnaes, the storied editorial cartoonist who made headlines earlier this year when she quit the Washington post when a cartoon criticizing owner Jeff Bezos was squashed. Telnaes was saluted by the prize committee for “delivering piercing commentary on powerful people and institutions with deftness, creativity – and a fearlessness that led to her departure from the news organization after 17 years.”
Congratulations to Hulls, Telnaes and all the winners.
