Transatlantic is proud to announce that “How to Make a Friend” by Zilla Jones has been shortlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize!
The winner will be announced on April 25. They will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and a two-week writing residency at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
The remaining four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts.
All five finalists had their work published on CBC Books. You can read Zilla’s story here: https://www.cbc.ca/books/literaryprizes/how-to-make-a-friend-by-zilla-jones-1.7167834
Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian woman writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). Her stories appear in Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall Magazine, the Ex-Puritan, Room Magazine, Bayou Magazine and The Journey Prize Stories. In 2023, she was a Journey Prize winner and a finalist in the Writers’ Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She has also won the Malahat Review Open Season Award, the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, the FreeFall short fiction award and placed second in the Prairie Fire and Austin Clarke contests. Her debut novel, The World So Wide, and a short fiction collection, So Much To Tell, are forthcoming with Cormorant Books in 2025 and 2026.
Jones previously made the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Our Father and has longlisted twice for earlier versions of How to Make a Friend, in 2022 and 2023.
Zilla is represented by Léonicka Valcius.
Congratulations Zilla!