Opening Showcase
with Heather O'Neill and Farzana Doctor.
$15.00
Award winning author Heather O’Neill joins Farzana Doctor for a discussion on the intense relationship between two charismatic friends in her latest book, When We Lost Our Heads. World building, detailed research, and a complex exploration of human nature have become hallmarks of O’Neill’s style and will be explored in this reading and discussion.
Heather O’Neill’s most recent bestselling novel The Lonely Hearts Hotel, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBCs Canada Reads. Her previous work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, has been 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. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award.
The Opening Showcase will also feature short readings from The New Quarterly magazine’s annual writing contest winners Hollay Ghadery, Thom Vernon, and Sandhya Thakrar.
This event will be live-streamed. Attendees can attend the event in-person or virtually.
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HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her bestselling novel, The Lonely Hearts Hotel, won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads. Her previous work, which includes Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night and Daydreams of Angels, was 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. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there with her daughter.
Photo credit: Julie Artacho
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FARZANA DOCTOR is a Toronto-based author, activist and a Registered Social Worker Psychotherapist. She has published four critically acclaimed novels, including Seven, which Ms. Magazine described as “fully feminist and ambitiously bold”, and was shortlisted for the Trillium and Evergreen Awards. Her new poetry collection, You Still Look The Same, which Quill & Quire has called “a powerful and necessary collection that breaks silences” was just released in May 2022.
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HOLLAY GHADERY is a multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph and her work has been published in various literary journals and magazines. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in Spring 2021. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023 and in 2024, her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is set to be published by Gordon Hill. You can find her on Instagram @hollayghadery and Twitter @Hollay2.
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SANDHYA THAKRAR holds a PhD in philosophy from Yale University, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation on romantic love. Her literary writing has recently appeared in Brick and Southern Humanities Review. She was born and raised in the Prairies, and she now lives in Toronto with her husband and their six-year-old.