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2025 has already been a huge year for Zilla Jones. The Winnipeg author released her debut novel The World So Wide last month, which tells the story of a mixed-race opera star chasing down validation and love. The release comes as Jones was named one of the five recipients of the 2025 Writers’ Trust Rising Stars, a program launched back in 2019 that supports the next wave of Canadian literary talent with mentorship and financial support.
“I was actually really shocked about that one,” says Jones about the recognition from the Writers’ Trust, the latest in a slew of accolades she has received in her writing career including the Journey Prize and the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction. “Most of the other awards I’ve won... I submitted a piece of writing, and it was considered and then the judges read everything and then they get back to you and say, ‘You won. You were shortlisted.’ For this one, it’s very special because you were selected by a writer.”
Jones was selected by British Columbian author Charlotte Gill, who writes about the intersection of race and culture as a Sikh-Canadian with Catholic roots in her family. This is an experience that Jones relates to in her writings, and it's an experience that she channels into the main character of The World So Wide, a Black opera singer from Winnipeg named Felicity Alexander.
“She learns that the beauty and the power of art is really that it’s healing,” says Jones. “And what it does for her, how much a part of her it is, and how important it is just to her self-image and her belonging to just be part of this music, to just be able to sing.”
Jones says that the validation that her protagonist receives is something that she’s still learning how to handle as she receives accolades for her writing. “Awards are great – who doesn’t like getting them,” she explains, “They are important, but you should never, in my view, be looking to that to validate you as an artist because that need to come from within and what you write. What you put on the page or sing or play, that needs to have inherent value.”
This lesson about validation is something that Alexander, the main character of The World So Wide (a title that nods to Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land), is desperately searching for. Her ambition to be a star on the greatest opera stages in the world causes her to cast people aside in the name of success, obsessing over herself and her career until she’s forced to confront conflict in Grenada, the home of her ancestors, in the early 1980’s when the United States invades.
“She’s facing a lot of obstacles, and that’s why she’s so selfish and driven,” says Jones. “So, readers are rooting for at the same time that, as one of my readers put it, ‘I want to slap her.’”
Slap-able qualities aside, lots of Alexander’s character is informed by Jones’ own singing experiences in ensembles like the Manitoba Opera chorus. With the knowledge of the art form comes the knowledge of the culture of opera, which, although much work has been to decolonize the genre, still is very Eurocentric in the stories it presents.
“The wonderful thing about 2025 is that there are more opportunities for different voices to be heard,” says Jones. “One theme of this novel definitely is Felicity’s voice being heard, both her singing voice and her political voice and her voice of herself as a human. I think for me as a writer to be heard and to be heard in ways like the Writers’ Trust selecting [me] and validating [me] definitely makes me feel that, ‘OK, this is a place where I do belong and can say something to say that people hopefully would like to hear.’”