Katie O'Neill Books in Order

If you want cozy fantasy first: The Tea Dragon Society → The Tea Dragon Festival → The Tea Dragon Tapestry
If you want a fairy tale romance: Princess Princess Ever After
If you want nature and community stories: Aquicorn Cove → The Moth Keeper
If you want a quieter coming-of-age fantasy: The Moth Keeper → A Song for You and I
For the youngest readers: Dewdrop

Katie O'Neill is a self-taught writer and illustrator from New Zealand whose graphic novels are full of tea, small creatures, gardens, weather, and kids trying to understand themselves. Their stories are gentle, but they are never flimsy. Again and again, they come back to kindness, community, and the quiet work of looking after people, places, and living things.

Growing up in New Zealand, they read a lot of manga, and the library shelves helped.

O'Neill has said that drawing and storytelling were never really separate for them. Even when they imagined writing prose fantasy at university, they kept sketching characters and key scenes alongside the words. One early comic, Counting Stars, was made for a contest run by Auckland University and did not even make the shortlist. They posted it online anyway, and the response was strong enough to show them there were readers ready for the kinds of stories they wanted to tell.

That early online audience helped shape the rest of their career. Princess Princess Ever After began as a webcomic before it became a book, and it already showed what O'Neill does so well: taking familiar fantasy shapes and making them warmer, kinder, and more open. The story gives readers princesses who rescue each other, make room for tenderness, and push back against the old fairy tale rules without losing the fun of ogres, towers, and adventure.

Then came tea dragons.

The Tea Dragon Society became the book that introduced a much wider audience to O'Neill's work. Greta, Minette, Hesekiel, Erik, and the tiny dragons let them blend lore, craft, memory, and friendship into something calm and inviting. The book went on to win Eisner, Harvey, and Dwayne McDuffie awards, and the story later grew into The Tea Dragon Festival and The Tea Dragon Tapestry. Across those books, O'Neill keeps returning to questions of tradition, belonging, grief, and how young people learn what they are good at.

They did not stay in one mode for long. Aquicorn Cove turns toward the sea and community recovery, and O'Neill has connected that book to their experience of living through devastating earthquakes in their hometown. Dewdrop goes younger and lighter, using an axolotl and a pond sports fair to talk about mindfulness, encouragement, and not turning every talent into a competition. Even at their most playful, their books keep asking how a community can make space for different kinds of people.

Their newer work stretches the canvas wider. The Moth Keeper follows a young guardian learning that duty can become too heavy to carry alone, while A Song for You and I pairs a ranger and a shepherd in a slower fantasy about identity, self-worth, and the shape a life can take. The landscapes in those books feel larger, but the emotional focus stays close. O'Neill's characters are still working out who they are, and nature is still part of the answer.

That balance, softness with real feeling, is what makes the books stick.

These days O'Neill is based in Aotearoa New Zealand. They have described themselves as a lover of nature, tea, and growing things, which is about as good a guide to the work as any. Outside making books, they enjoy food, plants, reading, walking, and podcasts. You can feel those interests all through the stories, right down to the leaves, the weather, and the warm drinks set on the table.