Stella Prize 2026: Lee Lai becomes first non-binary person and first novelist to win Cannon | Stella award

Aas the 2026 Stella award winner, Lee Lai has set two new firsts: the first non-binary winner and her book Cannon, which is the first graphic novel to win the $60,000 Australian prize for women and non-binary writers.

Cannon follows a Chinese woman living in Montreal in the “unhappy side of the twenties”. Cannon’s real name is Lucy, who became Luce at the time (loosely) Cannon – and like her first name, she is responsible without complaint. During the day, she takes care of her gung-gung (grandmother), who used to be cruel and weak from old age, without any help from her sane mother; and at night he works in the kitchen of a fine dining restaurant, preparing the mess. Cannon’s best friend, Trish, uses him as a springboard for all of her problems, and she is secretly investigating Cannon’s life as a troubling source 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 hard to hide, especially with so many nosy friends.”

The Stella Prize was first opened to non-binary writers in 2021. Lai, who was born in Melbourne and now lives in Montreal, was nominated for the first Stella in 2023 because of her exposure. Stone Fruitwhich won the Lambda Literary award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio award, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel award and two Ignatz awards.

Being the first columnist to win Stella is “excellent”, he says, adding: “I believe that this is a success for the comics community, and that it makes other readers interested in reading comics.”

About $60,000 in his lifetime? In the end, money is time. None of us have much. This money will keep me going for a long time.

Most of the time, he said, the picture book community “doesn’t have a lot of money.

The Stella’s judges praised Cannon as “a scathing examination of the lifelong weight that people – often women – carry, the immense suffering it takes to be ‘worthy’, and what can happen when they are repeatedly taken advantage of. (Bonus: it’s, in a way, very funny.

“Lai’s beautiful art evokes fear and despair, wonder and joy, and Cannon is an irrefutable reminder that — in the hands of a talented artist and storyteller — the best visual novels can do what prose alone can’t. And Cannon is one of the best.”

Lai started writing Cannon in 2019, working on and off for years “paying the bills with games related to humor or metaphors that I could take”. He found himself writing again when the world changed. Lai said: “In the beginning it was very interesting to have the intention of interacting with people for a long time. Then the epidemic happened and we could not see our friends and the relations of all people were very disturbed and it was not pleasant to do so.”

Cannon is a story about the failure of communication and an exercise in showing, not telling: from a quick glance, Lai’s position of sound tells the reader if a person is confused or ignored, if he is thinking or feeling sad. It is mostly monochrome, with vivid colors, and the pages are about four grids.

It’s a way to stop working, which Lai enjoys. “If you create an expectation (in the reader), when you break it, it’s effective. You can control the flow of the reader – you can tell them when to stop, when to pause, when to speed up.

Cannon, who has a certain problem, “is a great exaggeration of other ways that I am”, Lai says. Cannon’s best friend, Trish, is the embodiment of Lai’s “anxiety and skepticism about issues of cultural diversity”; Trish is writing a book loosely based on Cannon’s life without knowing it, but she worries more about whether she’s more “famous” for writing a gay book that might appeal to white financial institutions than she is for adapting her friend’s story.

“These are the kinds of things you think about (as a writer),” says Lai. “I wanted readers to feel as comfortable as I did with those questions.”

Lai mentions the artists Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), Craig Thompson (Blankets), Daniel Clowes (Spirit Land), Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth), Chester Brown (Louis Riel) and cousins ​​Marko and Jillian Tamaki (Skim) as influences whose work helped make “picture books recognized as a legitimate form of literature”.

“Like everyone, my sense of theater used to be superheroes and Peanuts,” he says. “Then I read Skim and Ghost World and realized, something is possible here.”

The term graphic novel is sometimes criticized by its critics as a marketing term to make comics appeal to older readers. Asked for his opinion, Lai laughs: “There’s something irreverent about the word ‘comic’ that I like and there’s something disconcerting about ‘novel’ that I try to avoid.