Seattle Culture
Seattle Author Wins Pulitzer Prize
Tessa Hulls wins for Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir
By Rob Smith May 6, 2025
Seattle author Tessa Hulls has added a Pulitzer Prize to her growing list of accolades for Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir.
The 2025 Pulitzers were announced May 5. Feeding Ghosts won in the “Memoir or Autobiography” category.
As Seattle magazine wrote in a profile of Hulls last year, Feeding Ghosts “braids together the narratives of three women: Hulls’ Chinese grandmother Sun Yi, her mother, Rose, and Hulls’ own experiences as a mixed-race woman seeking to understand her family’s past.”
The Pulitzer site says: “In her acclaimed graphic memoir debut, Tessa Hulls traces the reverberations of Chinese history across three generations of women in her family. Tessa’s grandmother, Sun Yi, was a Shanghai journalist swept up by the turmoil of the 1949 Communist victory. After fleeing to Hong Kong, she wrote a bestselling memoir about her persecution and survival — then promptly had a mental breakdown from which she never recovered.
“Growing up with Sun Yi, Tessa watches both her mother and grandmother struggle beneath the weight of unexamined trauma and mental illness, and bolts to the most remote corners of the globe. But once she turns thirty, roaming begins to feel less like freedom and more like running away. Feeding Ghosts is Tessa’s homecoming, a vivid, heartbreaking journey into history that exposes the fear and trauma that haunt generations, and the love that holds them together.”
Feeding Ghosts has racked up numerous awards since it came out last year, including:
• The National Books Critics Circle John Leonard Prize.
• The 2025 Anisfield Wolf Prize.
• The Libby Award for Best Graphic Novel.
• A Kirkus Nonfiction Prize Finalist.
It was also named a best book of the year by numerous publications, including Time, Forbes, NPR, LitHub, Publisher’s Weekly and the Library Journal.
“Working together (with her mother) on Feeding Ghosts was both emotionally brutal and emotionally transformative,” Hulls told Seattle magazine last year.
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