Lee Lai’s Cannon is the first graphic novel to win the Stella Prize
- Written by: Jen Webb, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Creative Practice, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
Author–artist Lee Lai has won the 2026 Stella Prize for her graphic novel, Cannon. This is the first time the Stella has been won by a graphic novel.
Lai, who was shortlisted for the Stella Prize in 2022 for Stone Fruit, has had work published in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Granta and more. Cannon was named as a best book for 2025 in several lists, and shortlisted for several prizes, including the Carol Shields Prize and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Clearly, this is someone whose voice and sense of the contemporary world is hitting all the right notes.
With Cannon, we meet a young woman valiantly, if not very competently, struggling to craft and maintain a satisfying life. She jogs; she cooks; she listens to mindfulness recordings; she watches horror movies with her best friend. She seems able to maintain her cool in a context where the pressure keeps mounting.
This creates a glorious portrait of contemporary ennui, with bursts of bright emotion – anger, grief, longing – breaking up the monochrome world she otherwise inhabits in this largely black-and-white graphic novel.
A woman on the edge
Her nickname is ironic: her given name, Lucy, becomes “Luce” thanks to her best friend Trish – and then “Luce Cannon”. For most of the book, there could not be less of a loose cannon than Lucy. She holds everything together. Her aggressive, demanding, frail grandfather. Her mother, who cannot or will not support her daughter. Her creepy boss, her stressed-out colleagues and her new romantic interest, who isn’t ready for “a girlfriend thing”, but would “still really like to hang out”.
Lucy is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Lai has already alerted readers to this, drawing a character who presents as being all patience and duty, but is in fact ready to snap. The novel opens to a thoroughly wrecked kitchen. In the middle of the mess, observed by a flock of large birds, sits Lucy, panting from the exertion of breaking up furniture and china.
A woman (later introduced as Trish) views the scene, then offers her an unbroken plate: “One for the road?” Lucy smashes it, and they leave together.
Authors: Jen Webb, Distinguished Professor Emerita of Creative Practice, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
