As the 2026 winner of the Stella prize, Lee Lai has established two new firsts: the first ever non-binary winner with her book Cannon, which is the first graphic novel to win the $60,000 Australian literary award for women and non-binary writers.
Cannon follows the titular, queer Chinese woman living in Montreal on the “uncool side of [her] twenties”. Cannon’s real name is Lucy, which became Luce then (loose) Cannon – and much like her unwanted nickname, she shoulders responsibility without complaint. During the day she cares for her gung-gung (maternal grandfather), a former tyrant enfeebled by age, without any help from her emotionally avoidant mother; and by night she works in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant, corralling chaos into order. Cannon’s longtime best friend Trish uses her as a soundboard for all of her problems, and is secretly mining Cannon’s life as a troubling source of inspiration for her writing career.
Speaking to Guardian Australia before her win was announced at a ceremony in Brisbane on Wednesday night, Lai says, “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.”
As for the impact of $60,000 on her life? “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. We joke that we are endlessly doing fundraisers and passing around the same $20 bill. In my world, this is a lot.”
The Stella judges have praised Cannon as “a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the profound toll it takes to be the ‘responsible one’, and what can happen when you are being taken advantage of repeatedly. (Bonus: it is also, somehow, very funny.)
“Lai’s elegant artistry evokes horror and poignancy, shock and delight, and Cannon is an incontestable reminder that – in the hands of a masterful artist and storyteller – the very best graphic novels can do what prose alone cannot. And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.”
Lai began writing Cannon in 2019, working on it on and off for years while “paying the bills with the comics-related or illustration gigs I could take”. She found herself rewriting it as her world changed. “At the start, it was very fun to have an objective of taking a long-term friendship and grinding it down,” Lai says. “Then the pandemic happened and we couldn’t see our friends and everyone’s friendships were feeling a lot more fragile and it was no longer fun to do that. So I ended up writing a lot more optimistic outcome for Cannon and Trish than I originally planned.”
Cannon is a story about failures of communication and an exercise in showing, not telling: from a quick glance, Lai’s positioning of speech bubbles tells the reader if a character is being interrupted or ignored, if they are pensive or frustrated. It is mostly monochrome, with impactful pops of colour, and the pages are almost entirely four grid.
It is a restrictive way to work, which Lai enjoys. “If you create expectation [in the reader], when you break it, it’s impactful. You can control the reader’s pacing – you can tell them when to halt, when to pause, when to speed up. I’m manipulating a reader to get lost in the story a bit and then, with a single page turn, I screech the brakes.”
Cannon, who is stoic to a fault, is “some really extreme exaggerations of some of the ways I am”, Lai says. Cannon’s best friend Trish, meanwhile, is the embodiment of Lai’s “anxieties and cynicisms about neoliberal diversity discourse in the cultural sector”; Trish is writing a novel heavily based on Cannon’s life without her knowledge, but frets more about whether she is a “fucking cliche” for writing a gay-immigrant novel that will likely be attractive to white funding boards than the ethics of swiping her friend’s story.
“These are the sort of things that you think about [as a writer],” Lai says. “I wanted the reader to feel as uncomfortable as I do around those questions.”
Lai cites graphic novelists Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Craig Thompson (Blankets), Daniel Clowes (Ghost World), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth), Chester Brown (Louis Riel) and cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki (Skim) as influences whose work had helped to make “graphic novels be recognised as a legitimate form of literature”.
“Like everybody, my understanding of comics was once superheroes and Peanuts,” she says. “And then I read Skim and Ghost World and saw that, actually, something else is possible here.”
The term graphic novel is sometimes disputed by those who dismiss it as a pretentious marketing term to make comics more palatable to adult readers. Asked for her opinion, Lai laughs: “There is an irreverence around the term ‘comic’ that I like and there is something snooty about ‘graphic novel’ that I try to stay away from. There’s a distancing from comics’ heritage – I’m like, ‘Our heritage is Peanuts! Accept it.’”