Pulitzer Prize Winner "Feeding Ghosts" Surprisingly Receives Little Attention

The graphic novel Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir by Tessa Hulls, published by MCD in 2024, has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, as announced on May 5. This accolade marks a significant achievement as it is only the second graphic novel to win a Pulitzer, following Art Spiegelman’s Maus in 1992, which received a Special Award. Notably, Feeding Ghosts won in the regular category of Memoir or Autobiography, competing against top-tier English prose globally, and it is Hulls' debut graphic novel.

The Pulitzer Prize, widely considered the most prestigious award in journalism, literature, and music in the US, stands just behind the Nobel Prize on the international stage. The win for Feeding Ghosts is a monumental achievement in the field of comics, yet it has received surprisingly little coverage. Since the announcement two weeks ago, only a few mainstream and trade publications, such as the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, along with one major comic book news outlet, Comics Beat, have reported on this significant event.

The Pulitzer Prize Board described 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 book, which took nearly a decade to create, explores the impact of Chinese history across three generations. It delves into the life of Hulls' grandmother, Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist who fled to Hong Kong after the 1949 Communist victory, wrote a bestselling memoir, and subsequently suffered from a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.

Hulls herself grew up witnessing the struggles of her mother and grandmother under the burden of unexamined trauma and mental illness. She dealt with this by initially leaving home for remote locations around the world. However, she eventually returned to confront her own fears and traumas, a process she describes as a generational haunting that required the love of family to heal. In an interview last month, Hulls stated, “I didn’t feel like I had a choice. My family ghosts literally told me I had to do this. 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 the acclaim, Hulls has expressed that Feeding Ghosts might be her last graphic novel. In another interview, she shared, “I learned that being a graphic novelist is really too isolating for me. My creative practice relies on being out in the world and responding to what I find there.” On her website, Hulls announced her intention to transition into becoming an embedded comics journalist, working alongside field scientists, indigenous groups, and nonprofits in remote environments.

Regardless of what the future holds for this groundbreaking artist, Feeding Ghosts deserves recognition and celebration beyond the realm of comics, especially within the broader literary community.