Bee Elton Photography/Stella PrizeAuthor–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 edgeHer 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. Trish may be selfish and a bit feckless, but she has been part of Lucy’s life since school. She knows her, perhaps, better than anyone else. In fact, they were pretty much destined to be best friends: “I think we might’ve been the only two gay Chinese anglophone teens in all of Lennoxville [a town in Quebec, Canada].” Such intimacy comes with its own problems. The first is how to keep a long-term friendship viable, in the face of the changing interests and aspirations of those involved. The second is whether being outsiders from the same mould – and having a shared enthusiasm for Australian horror movies – is enough for sustained intimacy. Trish, a very promising writer, is being supported by her ex-teacher, now her mentor, Joyce, who encourages her to write edgy work – work that foregrounds the young/Asian/gay identity. “To the funding board,” Joyce tells Trish. “you’re a piece of a cultural niche that they’d very much like in their pocket.” Trish finds this fascination with alterity “Gross”, but Joyce reminds her: “It’s money.” Lucy’s life and family are, for Trish, a rich vein of story, and she begins to mine it. Until Lucy discovers what she is doing and freezes Trish out. This, it seems, is the final straw. When Trish corners Lucy in the restaurant kitchen after hours, their quarrel sparks the destruction that opened the novel – this time brilliantly rendered in bright red cells, to the soundtrack of a meditation tape. Both women give themselves over to the wrecking party, while the birds look on.As they have been doing all through the novel, sometimes filling the cells, sometimes hovering on the edge. Corvids of course, have long been seen as portents: omens of death, or heralds of change. In this novel, they are probably filling both roles and, one hopes, offering Lucy at least some attention. No villainsShe deserves attention. Cannon is a gorgeous weaving of tragedy and comedy, brought together by a generous but sharply observant eye. Lai once said:I have a rule for when I’m writing characters, which is ‘no villains, only messes’. No one can actually be a full villain and, if we’re willing to focus in enough, everyone’s bullshit and everyone’s mess is something that can be empathised with.With all the mess Lucy both receives and generates, there is also empathy, compassion and connection. It is worth focusing in.Jen Webb has received funding from the Australian Research Council.