Lee Lai Wins 2026 Stella Prize With Cannon
Lee Lai won the 2026 Stella Prize for Cannon, becoming the first non-binary winner of the award and the first graphic novelist to take it. The $60,000 Australian literary prize had opened to non-binary writers in 2021, and this result pushes that change into the award’s record books.
Born in Melbourne and now based in Montreal, Lai first reached the Stella shortlist in 2023 with Stone Fruit. That book had already built a reputation through the Lambda Literary award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel prize and two Ignatz awards, so the new win extends an already decorated comics career into a prize that has historically centered other forms of writing.
Cannon and the Stella judges
Cannon follows a queer Chinese woman named Cannon, whose real name is Lucy, living in Montreal on the uncool side of her twenties. By night she works in the kitchen of a fine-dining restaurant, and by day she cares for her gung-gung. The judges called the book a bruising examination of the lifelong weight that people often women carry.
That description gives the prize its sharpest edge. A graphic novel won an award long associated with literary prose, and it did so with a book built around labor, care, and the strain of carrying responsibilities that never really stop. For comics readers, that is a strong signal that the category no longer sits outside the main literary lane.
Lee Lai’s comics business
Lai said before the announcement, "It's been a challenge to keep it secret, especially with many wonderfully nosy friends." After the result, Lai called being the first graphic novelist to win the Stella "pretty cool" and 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."
The prize money also changes the practical picture. 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." Lai added that the graphic novelist community "doesn't have a lot of money" and joked, "We joke that we are endlessly doing fundraisers and passing around the same $20 bill."
2021 opened the door
The 2021 rule change let non-binary writers compete for the Stella Prize, and Lai is now the first to turn that eligibility into a win. The 2026 result also makes Cannon the first graphic novel to take the $60,000 award, which moves the prize beyond the boundaries it had set before.
For readers and writers in comics, the practical effect is immediate: a book form often treated as peripheral now has a major literary prize attached to it. Lai’s Montreal-based work has already crossed from the comics shelf into awards territory, and Cannon gives that crossover a new ceiling to aim at.
