"Pulitzer Winner 'Feeding Ghosts' Gets Tepid Response"

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 honor since Art Spiegelman's Maus earned a Special Award in 1992. Unlike its predecessor, Feeding Ghosts won in the standard Memoir or Autobiography category, triumphing over other elite English-language works worldwide. Remarkably, this represents Hulls' graphic novel debut.

Widely regarded as America's most prestigious honor for journalism, literature, and musical composition, the Pulitzer remains second only to the Nobel Prize in global recognition.

Despite being a landmark achievement for the comics medium, coverage has been strikingly limited. Since the announcement, only a few mainstream sources like the Seattle Times and Publishers Weekly, along with comics specialist Comics Beat, have reported the news.

The Pulitzer Board praised the decade-in-the-making work as "a profound artistic exploration that vividly renders three generations of Chinese women - the author, her mother, and grandmother - while examining how trauma echoes through family histories."

Feeding Ghosts maps China's turbulent history through Hulls' family narrative. Her grandmother Sun Yi, a Shanghai journalist caught in the 1949 Communist revolution, later penned a Hong Kong bestseller about her persecution before suffering a permanent mental collapse.

This personal work began as familial obligation. "Our ghosts literally insisted I tell this story," Hulls explained in a recent interview, describing the nine-year process as "feeding the ghosts" of her ancestry.

The artist has suggested this might be her sole graphic novel. "The solitary nature of cartooning conflicts with my creative needs," she noted, expressing plans to transition into embedded comics journalism, collaborating with scientists and indigenous communities in remote locations.

Regardless of Hulls' future direction, Feeding Ghosts warrants celebration both within and beyond the graphic novel community for its artistic achievement.