Stories have great power to make visible what is invisible: moments of perception, transcendence, doubt, belief, and a yearning for meaning.

Jane Urquhart and Heather O’Neill, on stage with host Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, share very different stories of turbulent upheavals that each assert the forces of our inner self, seek to reclaim what is lost, and show the power we each hold to change our lives and determine our future.

In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, one that reaches through time and space, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and her passionate yet distant love affair with an enigmatic man—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery alters millions of lives around the world.

Jane Urquhart’s incandescent new novel, In Winter I Get Up at Night, charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines.

Paul Lynch writes, “A work of aching beauty alert always to the wondrous. Jane Urquhart is a master storyteller.”

In The Capital of Dreams—to be released in September—Heather O’Neill delivers a vivid, breathtaking dark fairytale of life, death, and betrayal.

Clara Bottom and her 14-year-old daughter Sofia live in a small country that Europe has forgotten. Old myths of trees coming alive and faeries living among their roots have yielded to an explosion of the arts and philosophy—and no one is as brilliant as the writer Clara Bottom. When the country’s greatest enemy invades, Clara turns to her daughter to smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But the train stops in the middle of a forest, and as Sofia runs for her life she loses her mother’s most prized possession. Frightened and alone in a country at war, Sofia must make choices between kindness and survival to find a way to reclaim what she has lost.

Jane Urquhart

Jane Urquhart was born in the far north of Ontario, Canada. She is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, among them The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger in France; Away, winner of the Trillium Award, The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for The Orange Prize in the UK, and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and Britain’s Booker Prize. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, and four books of poetry, and she has also written a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and was editor of the most recent Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work, which is published in many countries, has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. She is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2016 she published A Number of Things which was commissioned by publisher HarperCollins to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial.

Urquhart has received several honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, and the Royal Military College. She has served on the Board of PEN Canada and on the Advisory Board for the Restoration of the Vimy Memorial, and on several international prize juries including that of the International Dublin IMPAC Award, the Giller Prize, The Governor Generals Award Fiction Jury, and the American International Neustadt Award. She has also been writer-in-residence at University of Toronto, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, and Western University, and was appointed 2017-2018 Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin Ireland. She has taught creative writing at each of these institutions and is an adjunct professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

In December of 2023, an honorary Doctor of Letters was conferred on her by University College Dublin. Jane lives in Northumberland County, Ontario.

HEATHER O’NEILL

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads was a #1 national bestseller and was 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. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today.

LUCY VAN OLDENBARNEVELD

Communications advisor, actor, writer and media veteran, LUCY VAN OLDENBARNEVELD’s early career including reporting for Deutsche Welle in Germany and CBC Whitehorse. She spent a year working in China before moving to CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning as writer-broadcaster and host. In 2006 she moved to television as the host of CBC News at 6, where she was eventually joined by co-host Adrian Harewood.

As an actress Lucy is known for portraying journalists in such films as “Long Shot”, starring Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron, and Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. Her one-woman show Me, Vivien Leigh and the Roller Rink, is a hilarious romp through her feathered-bangs-and-Jordache-jeans adolescence in Hamilton. It was performed at the Undercurrents Festival in 2022. She lives in Ottawa.​

Stories have great power to make visible what is invisible: moments of perception, transcendence, doubt, belief, and a yearning for meaning.

Jane Urquhart and Heather O’Neill, on stage with host Lucy van Oldenbarneveld, share very different stories of turbulent upheavals that each assert the forces of our inner self, seek to reclaim what is lost, and show the power we each hold to change our lives and determine our future.

In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, one that reaches through time and space, recounting the stories of her mother’s entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother’s dawning spirituality; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and her passionate yet distant love affair with an enigmatic man—a brilliant scientist whose great discovery alters millions of lives around the world.

Jane Urquhart’s incandescent new novel, In Winter I Get Up at Night, charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century—colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines.

Paul Lynch writes, “A work of aching beauty alert always to the wondrous. Jane Urquhart is a master storyteller.”

In The Capital of Dreams—to be released in September—Heather O’Neill delivers a vivid, breathtaking dark fairytale of life, death, and betrayal.

Clara Bottom and her 14-year-old daughter Sofia live in a small country that Europe has forgotten. Old myths of trees coming alive and faeries living among their roots have yielded to an explosion of the arts and philosophy—and no one is as brilliant as the writer Clara Bottom. When the country’s greatest enemy invades, Clara turns to her daughter to smuggle her new manuscript to safety on the last train evacuating children from the city. But the train stops in the middle of a forest, and as Sofia runs for her life she loses her mother’s most prized possession. Frightened and alone in a country at war, Sofia must make choices between kindness and survival to find a way to reclaim what she has lost.

Jane Urquhart

Jane Urquhart was born in the far north of Ontario, Canada. She is the author of eight internationally acclaimed novels, among them The Whirlpool, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger in France; Away, winner of the Trillium Award, The Underpainter, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for The Orange Prize in the UK, and The Stone Carvers, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Award, and Britain’s Booker Prize. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, and four books of poetry, and she has also written a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and was editor of the most recent Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Her work, which is published in many countries, has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award and the Harbourfront Festival Prize. She is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and is an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2016 she published A Number of Things which was commissioned by publisher HarperCollins to celebrate Canada’s sesquicentennial.

Urquhart has received several honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, including the University of Toronto, University of Western Ontario, and the Royal Military College. She has served on the Board of PEN Canada and on the Advisory Board for the Restoration of the Vimy Memorial, and on several international prize juries including that of the International Dublin IMPAC Award, the Giller Prize, The Governor Generals Award Fiction Jury, and the American International Neustadt Award. She has also been writer-in-residence at University of Toronto, University of Guelph, University of Ottawa, and Western University, and was appointed 2017-2018 Craig Dobbin Chair of Canadian Studies at University College Dublin Ireland. She has taught creative writing at each of these institutions and is an adjunct professor in the School of Creative Writing at the University of Toronto.

In December of 2023, an honorary Doctor of Letters was conferred on her by University College Dublin. Jane lives in Northumberland County, Ontario.

HEATHER O’NEILL

HEATHER O’NEILL is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her most recent novel, When We Lost Our Heads was a #1 national bestseller and was 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. She has won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award. Born and raised in Montreal, O’Neill lives there today.

LUCY VAN OLDENBARNEVELD

Communications advisor, actor, writer and media veteran, LUCY VAN OLDENBARNEVELD’s early career including reporting for Deutsche Welle in Germany and CBC Whitehorse. She spent a year working in China before moving to CBC Radio’s Ottawa Morning as writer-broadcaster and host. In 2006 she moved to television as the host of CBC News at 6, where she was eventually joined by co-host Adrian Harewood.

As an actress Lucy is known for portraying journalists in such films as “Long Shot”, starring Seth Rogan and Charlize Theron, and Arrival, starring Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner and Forest Whitaker. Her one-woman show Me, Vivien Leigh and the Roller Rink, is a hilarious romp through her feathered-bangs-and-Jordache-jeans adolescence in Hamilton. It was performed at the Undercurrents Festival in 2022. She lives in Ottawa.​