Seattle author Tessa Hulls wins 2025 Pulitzer Prize

Seattle author Tessa Hulls, who confronted her family’s complex, continent-spanning history in her graphic novel “Feeding Ghosts,” has won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography. It is her first book.

The 2025 prize winners were announced Monday by Pulitzer Prize administrator Marjorie Miller, who 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.” Pulitzer Prize winners receive a certificate and a $15,000 cash award.

Hulls, who once described herself as a “compulsive genre-hopper” in her work, is a writer and artist who’s published essays in outlets including The Washington Post and Atlas Obscura, as well as comics in The Rumpus and City Arts, and has presented solo arts shows at local spaces like Ghost Gallery and Joe Bar.

“Feeding Ghosts,” a mammoth project of investigation and creation that took Hulls nearly a decade to complete, begins with her grandmother, Sun Yi. A persecuted journalist who fled China’s communist government, Sun Yi reached safety in Hong Kong, wrote a bestselling memoir, and then suffered a mental breakdown.

As Hulls traced her roots and her relationships with her mother and grandmother, she examined the way these traumas echo across generations while also grappling with unreliable narrators in her family.

“I realized that the only way out was through in terms of being transparent. I wanted my readers to have the ability to wrestle with the same confusion that I felt,” Hulls told the Seattle Times in 2024. “It didn’t feel ethical to try and offer any sense of certainty when that certainty didn’t really exist within the fabric of what I was working with.”