"Pulitzer Winner 'Feeding Ghosts' Underrated"

The graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (MCD, 2024) has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, as announced on May 5.

This marks only the second time a graphic novel has received the Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus in 1992. While Maus was honored with a Special Award, Feeding Ghosts earned its place in the regular Memoir or Autobiography category—a remarkable achievement for Hulls’ debut work competing against globally acclaimed prose.

Widely regarded as America's highest honor in journalism, literature, and music, the Pulitzer stands second globally only to the Nobel Prize.

Despite being a landmark moment for comics, mainstream coverage has been surprisingly sparse. Since the announcement two weeks prior, just a few industry publications like Seattle Times, Publishers Weekly, and Comics Beat have covered the news.

The Pulitzer Board praised Hulls’ decade-long project as "a poignant artistic exploration using illustrations to illuminate three generations of Chinese women—the author, her mother, and grandmother—revealing how trauma echoes through familial histories."

The memoir traces China’s historical turbulence through Hulls’ family: her grandmother Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist displaced by the 1949 Communist revolution, wrote a bestselling survival memoir in Hong Kong before succumbing to mental illness.

"I felt compelled—these family ghosts insisted I tell their story," Hulls revealed in a recent interview, explaining how her nine-year creative journey became "an act of feeding ghosts through familial duty."

Though likely Hulls’ sole graphic novel, she’s transitioning into documentary comics journalism. "The medium proved too isolating," she noted, planning collaborations with scientists and indigenous communities through her website.

Regardless of Hulls’ future path, Feeding Ghosts demands recognition both within and beyond the graphic narrative community.