44. Heather O’Neill in Conversation

Few authors can transport us quite the way Heather O’Neill does. Whether gritty, small town Quebec, or strange circuses or—in the case of her latest work—the magical woods of a forgotten country—we are immersed in vivid worlds of heightened emotions and possibility. In The Capital of Dreams, a teenage girl embarks on a breathtakingly dark fairytale, attempting to find her mother’s lost manuscript in a country beset by war. In conversation with Shaena Lambert, O’Neill will discuss why she chose to delve so far into imagination for this latest novel, and how fairy tales can tell us more than we think about our reality. O’Neill’s language has been described as “delicious as cake.” Savour a conversation with a brilliant mind and multi-award-winning author who has become a revered staple of literature the world over. Moderated by Shaena Lambert.

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Shaena Lambert

SHAENA LAMBERT is the author of four works of fiction: Petra, Oh, My Darling, Radiance and The Falling Woman. Her essay on her writing apprenticeship, “Monkey Business,” was recently featured in Off the Record (Bibliosasis): six Canadian women writers exploring how they became fiction writers. Petra won the 2021 Ethel Wilson Award from the BC and Yukon Book Prize and was a CBC best book of the year. She’s been a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Ethel Wilson Award, the Evergreen Award, the Danuta Gleed Award and the Frank O'Connor Award for the Short Story. Her stories have been anthologized four times in Best Canadian Stories, as well as in the Journey Prize Anthology, and published in The Walrus, Zoetrope All Story, Ploughshares, Toronto Life and other magazines. She’s at work on a new novel.

Heather O’Neill

HEATHER O'NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her last novel, When We Lost Our Heads, was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, she lives there today.