The graphic novel Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD, 2024) by Tessa Hulls has won the Pulitzer Prize, announced on May 5.

Feeding Ghosts is only the second graphic novel to receive a Pulitzer Prize. The first was Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992, which was a Special Award. This time, Feeding Ghosts won in a standard category, Memoir or Autobiography, competing directly with the finest English prose works. Remarkably, it is also Hulls’ debut graphic novel.

Regarded as the most prestigious US award for journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer Prize is internationally second only to the Nobel Prize.

This is a monumental achievement and arguably the most significant news in the comics industry. Surprisingly, it has received very little media attention. In the two weeks since the award, only a few mainstream and trade publications, such as the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, have covered it, with Comics Beat being the sole major comics news outlet to report the story.

The Pulitzer Prize Board described the book, which Hulls says took nearly a decade to complete, 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.”

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

Growing up with Sun Yi, Hulls witnessed her mother and grandmother grappling with unaddressed trauma and mental illness. She coped by traveling to the world's most remote regions, but ultimately returned to confront her own fears and the generational haunting that could only be resolved 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 really stepping into something that was my family duty.”

However, this debut may also be her final graphic novel. “I learned that being a graphic novelist is really 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 working in remote environments.”

Whatever path this pioneering artist takes next, Feeding Ghosts merits recognition and celebration both within the comics community and beyond.