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Tessa Hulls’ “Feeding Ghosts” graphic novel wins Pulitzer Prize

By John Freeman on May 7, 2025 • ( 0 )

Artist, writer, and adventurer Tessa Hulls has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for her graphic novel, Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Novel, in the category for Memoir or Autobiography. She follows Art Spiegelman, who won a Special Pulitzer for Maus in 1982, 33 years ago.

Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Novel by Tessa Hulls

Feeding Ghosts is 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.

Hulls’ first, and possibly, last book – was praised by the judges as “an affecting work of literary art and discovery whose illustrations bring to life three generations of Chinese women – and the experience of trauma handed down with family histories.”

As the mixed race daughter of two first generation immigrants to America, Tessa Hulls landed in a tiny town of 350 people, and grew up with no models of how she fit within American culture. Her family didn’t have TV and the internet didn’t yet exist, so she spent her formative years reading her way through the public library and roaming alone through the hills with a backpack full of books (she still does this). This fusion of solitude, research, and forward motion remains the bedrock of her extremely multidisciplinary creative practice.

As her own online biography notes, Tessa went quietly and happily feral in 2011 after a 5000 mile solo bike ride from southern California to Maine, and her restlessness has joyously dragged her across all seven continents. Her travels have led to everything from bartending in Antarctica to painting murals in Ghana to hosting book clubs in Denali National Park, but she currently splits her time between Juneau, Alaska and Seattle, Washington.

In addition to her Pulitzer win, Feeding Ghosts has also won the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for best first book, the Libby Award (as in the beloved library app, as voted on by the nation’s librarians – which holds a special place in Tessa’s heart) for best graphic novel, and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for memoir, which marks the first time in its 90-year history that the award has honored a graphic novel.

Feeding Ghosts was also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and was longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction. In spite of all this, she says she is still completely sure she is never making another book.

Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Atlas Obscura, and Adventure Journal, and her comics have been published in The Rumpus, City Arts, and SPARK. She has received grants from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture and 4Culture, and she is a fellowship recipient from the Washington Artist Trust.

Exploring love, grief, exile, and identity, Tessa Hulls genre-defying graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts tells the story of her Chinese grandmother, Sun Yi; her mother, Rose; and herself. Sun Yi was a Shanghai journalist caught in the political crosshairs of the 1949 Communist victory. After eight years of government harassment, she fled to Hong Kong with her daughter. Upon arrival, Sun Yi wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival, used the proceeds to put Rose in an elite boarding school – and promptly had a breakdown that left her committed to a mental institution. Rose eventually came to the United States on a scholarship and brought Sun Yi to live with her.

Tessa watched her mother care for Sun Yi, both of them struggling under the weight of Sun Yi’s unexamined trauma and mental illness. Vowing to escape her mother’s smothering fear, Tessa left home and traveled to the farthest-flung corners of the globe (Antarctica). But at the age of thirty, it starts to feel less like freedom and more like running away, and she returns home to face the history that shaped her family.

Extensively researched and gorgeously rendered, Feeding Ghosts is Hulls’s homecoming, a vivid journey into the beating heart of one family, set against the dark backdrop of Chinese history. By turns fascinating and heartbreaking, inventive and poignant, Feeding Ghosts exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.

• Feeding Ghosts is available from all good bookshops | UKBookshop.org Affiliate Link

• Full Pulitzer Awards 2025 List here

With thanks to Paul Gravett

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.