Graphic Memoir Feeding Ghosts Secures Pulitzer with Little Fanfare

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

Feeding Ghosts marks only the second graphic novel to claim a Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992, which earned a Special Award. Unlike Maus, Feeding Ghosts triumphed in the Memoir or Autobiography category, outshining top English prose worldwide. Remarkably, this is Hulls’ debut graphic novel.

Widely regarded as the pinnacle of achievement in U.S. journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer Prize holds global prestige, rivaled only by the Nobel Prize.

Despite its monumental significance for the comics industry, the win has garnered scant attention. In the two weeks since the announcement, only a few outlets, including Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and one major comic news source, Comics Beat, have covered the story.

Nearly a decade in the making, 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 memoir weaves the impact of Chinese history through three generations. Hulls’ grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist, was caught in the upheaval of the 1949 Communist victory. After escaping to Hong Kong, she penned a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival but later suffered a mental breakdown, never fully recovering.

Growing up alongside Sun Yi, Hulls witnessed her mother and grandmother grapple with unprocessed trauma and mental illness. To cope, Hulls ventured to the world’s most remote regions, only to return and confront her inherited fears, a generational burden eased through familial love.

“I felt compelled to tell this story. My family’s ghosts demanded it,” Hulls shared in a recent interview. “Feeding Ghosts began a nine-year journey of embracing my family’s legacy.”

Yet, this debut may be Hulls’ final graphic novel. “The isolation of creating graphic novels doesn’t suit me,” she noted in another interview. “My creativity thrives on engaging with the world.” Her website outlines her next chapter: working as an embedded comics journalist with field scientists, indigenous communities, and nonprofits in remote settings.

Regardless of her future path, Feeding Ghosts merits widespread acclaim, both within and beyond the comics community.