Lee Lai makes history with Stella Prize win for graphic novel Cannon

Lee Lai has won the 2026 Stella Prize, becoming the first non-binary person and the first graphic novelist to receive the $60,000 Australian literary award. The win was announced at a ceremony in Brisbane on Wednesday night, marking a significant shift for a prize that had previously been awarded exclusively to prose authors since it opened to non-binary writers in 2021.

Lai’s winning work, Cannon, follows Lucy, a queer Chinese woman in her twenties living in Montreal, who navigates repression and responsibility while caring for her elderly grandfather. The graphic novel is mostly monochrome with strategic use of colour and relies heavily on a four-panel grid structure to control pacing. Lai began writing the work in 2019, revising the ending to be more optimistic following the pandemic.

Speaking to Guardian Australia ahead of the announcement, Lai noted that the prize money would provide significant financial stability, highlighting that the comics community often lacks funds. “Ultimately, money is time,” she said. “This money will let me go for a very long time.” She added that the win is “pretty cool” and hopes it makes readers more interested in reading comics.

The Stella judges praised Cannon as a “bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry”. They noted that Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, describing the work as an incontestable reminder that the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot.

Lai, who was previously nominated for the Stella in 2023 for her debut Stone Fruit, cites influences including Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware. She acknowledged the term “graphic novel” is sometimes disputed as a marketing term but insisted on the heritage of comics like Peanuts. Her previous work won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel prize, and two Ignatz awards.