Lee Lai has won the $60,000 Stella prize in 2026 for her graphic novel Cannon, marking two historic firsts: the first non-binary winner and the first graphic novel to win the prestigious Australian literary award for women and non-binary writers.
A Groundbreaking Win
Speaking to Guardian Australia before the announcement at a ceremony in Brisbane, Lai said, "It's been a challenge to keep it secret, especially with many wonderfully nosy friends." The Stella prize first opened to non-binary writers in 2021. Lai, born in Melbourne and now based in Montreal, was previously nominated for the Stella in 2023 for her debut Stone Fruit, which won multiple awards including the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ comics.
Being the first graphic novelist to win the Stella is "pretty cool," Lai said. "I hope that this is a win for the comics community as well, and that it makes some readers more interested in reading comics."
About 'Cannon'
Cannon follows the titular queer Chinese woman living in Montreal on the "uncool side of [her] twenties." Cannon, whose real name is Lucy (which became Luce then Cannon), shoulders responsibility without complaint. By day, she cares for her gung-gung (maternal grandfather), a former tyrant now enfeebled by age, without help from her emotionally avoidant mother. By night, she works in a fine-dining restaurant kitchen. Her longtime best friend Trish uses her as a sounding board and secretly mines Cannon's life for inspiration for her writing career.
The Stella judges 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." They added, "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."
Financial Impact and Community
Regarding the $60,000 prize, Lai said, "Ultimately, money is time. None of us have a lot of that. This money will let me go for a very long time." She noted that 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."
Writing Process and Influences
Lai began writing Cannon in 2019, working on it on and off 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 said. "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 color, and the pages are almost entirely four-grid panels. Lai enjoys this restrictive format: "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 embodies Lai's "anxieties and cynicisms about neoliberal diversity discourse in the cultural sector"; Trish writes 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 than the ethics of swiping her friend's story. "These are the sort of things that you think about [as a writer]," Lai said. "I wanted the reader to feel as uncomfortable as I do around those questions."
Lai cites graphic novelists Marjane Satrapi, Craig Thompson, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, Chester Brown, and cousins Mariko and Jillian Tamaki as influences whose work helped make "graphic novels be recognised as a legitimate form of literature." She said, "Like everybody, my understanding of comics was once superheroes and Peanuts. And then I read Skim and Ghost World and saw that, actually, something else is possible here."
When asked about the term "graphic novel," which some dismiss as a pretentious marketing term, Lai laughed: "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.'"
