Tessa Hulls' debut graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir, published by MCD in 2024, has achieved a historic milestone by winning the Pulitzer Prize on May 5. This accolade marks it as only the second graphic novel ever to receive this prestigious award, following Art Spiegelman’s Maus, which won a Special Award in 1992. Remarkably, Feeding Ghosts secured the Pulitzer in the regular category of Memoir or Autobiography, standing alongside the finest English prose globally.
The Pulitzer Prize, considered the most prestigious in the United States for journalism, literature, and music, ranks just below the Nobel Prize internationally. This win is a monumental achievement in the realm of comics, yet it has surprisingly received scant attention. Since its announcement two weeks ago, coverage has been limited to a few mainstream and trade publications such as the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, and just one major comic book news outlet, Comics Beat.
The Pulitzer Prize Board praised 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 graphic novel, which took nearly a decade to create, explores 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's memoir of persecution and survival became a bestseller, though she later suffered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.
Hulls herself grew up witnessing the struggles of her mother and grandmother with unexamined trauma and mental illness. Her journey took her to the most remote corners of the world, but she eventually returned to confront her own fears and traumas, a process she describes as a "generational haunting" that required the healing power of family 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 really stepping into something that was my family duty."
Despite the success of Feeding Ghosts, Hulls has indicated that this may be her last graphic novel. "I learned that being a graphic novelist is really too isolating for me," she shared in another interview. Her future aspirations are to become an embedded comics journalist, working with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits in remote environments, as stated on her website.
Regardless of what lies ahead for Hulls, Feeding Ghosts stands as a testament to the power of graphic novels and deserves recognition and celebration beyond the comic world.
