"Feeding Ghosts Wins Pulitzer, Yet Receives Minimal Reaction"

The graphic novel Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls, published by MCD in 2024, has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, announced on May 5. This accolade marks a significant achievement as Feeding Ghosts is only the second graphic novel to win a Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1992. Unlike Maus, which won a Special Award, Feeding Ghosts triumphed in the regular category of Memoir or Autobiography, standing toe-to-toe with top-tier English prose. Remarkably, this is Hulls' debut in the graphic novel genre.

The Pulitzer Prize, often hailed as the most esteemed award in U.S. journalism, literature, and music, is surpassed only by the Nobel Prize on the global stage. This win for Feeding Ghosts is a monumental moment in the comic world, yet it has received surprisingly little attention. Since the announcement two weeks ago, only a few mainstream and trade publications, such as Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, along with one major comic book news outlet, Comics Beat, have covered this groundbreaking news.

Hulls spent nearly a decade crafting Feeding Ghosts, which the Pulitzer Prize Board praised 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 narrative delves into the impact of Chinese history across three generations. Hulls' grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist, was caught in the chaos of the 1949 Communist victory and fled to Hong Kong. There, she authored a bestselling memoir about her ordeals but later suffered a mental breakdown from which she never fully recovered.

Growing up with Sun Yi, Hulls witnessed the struggles of her mother and grandmother under the burden of unexamined trauma and mental illness. This led her to initially leave home for remote parts of the world. However, she eventually returned to confront her own fears and trauma, a generational haunting that she felt compelled to address. "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 this monumental achievement, Hulls hinted that Feeding Ghosts might be her only graphic novel. "I learned that being a graphic novelist is really too isolating for me," she shared in another interview. Her future aspirations lie in becoming an embedded comics journalist, collaborating with field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits in remote settings, as stated on her website.

Regardless of what lies ahead for this pioneering artist, Feeding Ghosts merits widespread recognition and celebration beyond the comic sphere.