Imagination Writers’ Festival: Valentine in Montreal with Heather O’Neill and Arizona O’Neill
Meet Heather O’Neill and Arizona O’Neill, the writer and illustrator of the novel Valentine in Montreal, during this live interview followed by a Q&A!
Host: Julia Caron, CBC journalist
This activity is presented with the collaboration of the Writers Out Loud program of the Quebec Writers’ Federation, and CBC Radio.
Arizona O’Neill
Arizona O’Neill is a Montreal author and illustrator. She is the illustrator of Nelly Arcan’s L’enfant dans le miroir and Heather O’Neill’s Valentine in Montreal. Her comics have appeared in Hazlitt, Exclaim!, Canadian Geographic, and The Montreal Gazette. She has created animated videos for many outlets, including CBC. A regular contributor to Radio-Canada’s Il restera toujours la culture, she is one half of the Bookstagram page @ONeillReads. Her graphic novel Opioids and Organs is coming out in May 2026 with Drawn & Quarterly.
Heather O’Neill
Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer, and essayist. Her most recent novel is The Capital of Dreams. Her previous works include When We Lost Our Heads, which was a #1 national bestseller and a finalist for the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal; 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; and 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 still lives there today.