Pulitzer Winner 'Feeding Ghosts' Overlooked

Tessa Hulls' graphic novel Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir (MCD, 2024) has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, with the announcement made on May 5.

This marks only the second time a graphic novel has received a Pulitzer. The first was Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992, which earned a Special Award. Feeding Ghosts, however, won in the standard Memoir or Autobiography category, competing directly against the finest English-language prose. It's especially notable as Hulls' debut work in the medium.

Feeding Ghosts is the second graphic novel to ever win the Pulitzer, the first being Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992.

Regarded as the most prestigious honor in American journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer Prize is internationally second only to the Nobel Prize.

This is a landmark achievement for the comics industry, yet it has received surprisingly little coverage. In the two weeks following 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.

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

As a child, Hulls witnessed both her mother and grandmother struggling with the burden of unaddressed trauma and mental illness. She coped by traveling to some of the world's most remote places, but ultimately returned home to confront her own inherited fears and trauma, a process she describes as a generational haunting that could only be resolved through 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 its success, this may be Hulls' first and last 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.” Her website states she is now “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 chooses next, Feeding Ghosts merits recognition and celebration, both within the comics community and beyond.