"“It’s been a challenge to keep it secret, especially with many wonderfully nosy friends.”"
"“The Stella prize was first opened to non-binary writers in 2021. Lai, who was born in Melbourne and is now based in Montreal, was first nominated for the Stella in 2023 for her debut Stone Fruit, which won the Lambda Literary award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel prize and two Ignatz awards.”"
"“Being the first graphic novelist to win the Stella is pretty cool,” she says, adding: “I hope that this is a win for the comics community as well, and that it makes some readers more interested in reading comics.”"
"“Ultimately, money is time. None of us have a lot of that. This money will let me go for a very long time. Generally, she says, the graphic novelist community doesn’t have a lot of money.”"
Lee Lai won the 2026 Stella prize with Cannon, the first graphic novel to receive the $60,000 award for women and non-binary writers. Cannon centers on a queer Chinese woman in Montreal on the “uncool” side of her twenties, whose name shifts from Lucy to Luce and then to Cannon. She cares for her gung-gung during the day without support from an emotionally avoidant mother, and she works at a fine-dining restaurant at night, turning chaos into order. Her best friend Trish relies on her as a soundboard while secretly drawing material from her life for a writing career. Lai hopes the win brings more readers to comics and views the prize money as time.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]