"Pulitzer Winner 'Feeding Ghosts' Gets Muted Response"

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD, 2024) by Tessa Hulls has secured the Pulitzer Prize, as announced on May 5.

This marks only the second time a graphic novel has won the Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus in 1992, which received a Special Award. Unlike its predecessor, Feeding Ghosts earned its place in a competitive category—Memoir or Autobiography—standing tall against the finest English prose worldwide. Remarkably, this is Hulls’ debut in the graphic novel medium.

Often regarded as America’s highest honor in journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer Prize is internationally eclipsed only by the Nobel.

Despite being a landmark achievement for the comics industry, media coverage has been surprisingly sparse. Since the announcement two weeks ago, only select mainstream and trade publications—including the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly—and one major comics outlet, Comics Beat, have reported on this historic win.

The Pulitzer Board praised Hulls’ decade-long labor as "an affecting work of literary art and discovery," where illustrations vividly trace three generations of Chinese women—the author, her mother, and grandmother—illuminating how trauma echoes through family histories.

Feeding Ghosts maps China’s turbulent history across these generations. Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist caught in the 1949 Communist revolution’s upheaval. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she penned a bestselling survival memoir before succumbing to mental illness.

Raised amidst this legacy, Hulls wandered the globe’s remotest reaches to escape her family’s unresolved trauma before finally confronting it through this project. "Our ghosts demanded this," she revealed in a recent interview, explaining the title: "Feeding these ghosts became my nine-year journey of familial obligation."

This Pulitzer-winning debut might also be Hulls’ farewell to graphic novels. "The solitude doesn’t suit me," she admitted elsewhere. Her website hints at a new chapter as an embedded comics journalist collaborating with scientists and indigenous communities in extreme environments.

Regardless of Hulls’ future path, Feeding Ghosts warrants celebration—both within the comics world and far beyond.