Lee Lai Becomes First Non-Binary Winner Of The Stella Prize

Author Lee Lai has been awarded the Stella Prize, one of Australia’s most prestigious literary awards, for her novel Cannon, marking the first time either a non-binary writer, or graphic novelist has won.

Open to women and non-binary authors, the Stella Prize was created in 2012 after the continuous absence of women acknowledged by the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and was extended to include non-binary authors in 2021. The prize awards $60,000 to the winning author, with previous winners including Evelyn Araluen, Jess Hill, Alexis Wright, and Michelle de Kretser.

Lai had previously been nominated for the Stella with her 2023 debut Stone Fruit, which went on to win the Lambda Literary award for LGBTQ comics, the Cartoonist Studio prize, the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel prize, and two Ignatz awards.

Accepting the award on Thursday night, Lai acknowledged the historic nature of her win, saying it was a “complicated but great honour to be the first trans person accepting this award in a moment when anti-trans rhetoric has become such a major fascist playing card.”

Lai’s book, Cannon, follows Lucy, a queer Chinese woman living in Montreal, as she balances her responsibilities to her family with her job in the kitchen of a fast-paced, fine dining restaurant, all while her best friend Trish secretly and heavily draws on Lucy’s life to write a novel.

The book was shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, the QWF Literary Awards and the GLAAD Media Awards, and was also named a ‘best book of 2025’ by the Sydney Morning Herald, NPR, Guardian Australia and ABC Arts.

A study in love and anger

In their report, the judging panel said the graphic novel was “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.

“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,” they said. “And Cannon is absolutely one of the best.”

Lai began writing Cannon in 2019, with the hugely turbulent years that followed leading her to question why she was making art when she could be helping her community as pandemic, genocide, and social inequality was so rife.

“[Cannon] is a story about small-scale human follies and the excruciating process of learning and growing through them,” she told the audience.

“It’s also a book about love and about rage and those are two emotions that have fuelled my efforts as an artist and as an organiser for the past many years, and if I must think about the fact that this book is landing for somebody else then my big hope is that it acts as a catharsis and an encouragement to experience some real love or some real anger and that one might use that for something worthwhile.”