The Sidney Prize and Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize
The Sidney Prize is a prize given to writers who use journalism for the common good. The prize has been awarded since 1950 and has honored contributors to the daily press, periodicals and labor press, and to radio and television. It also has given grants to support lecture series on college campuses and to encourage investigative reporting. The Foundation believes that the responsibilities of a free press include illumination of the great issues of our time, including the search for a basis for peace, the need for better housing and medical care, the quest for civil liberties, and the battle against discrimination based on race, nationality, or religion.
The 2023 Sydney Peace Prize Lecture will be given by Iranian-born human rights activist Nazanin Boniadi. She is the founder and driving force behind the #WomenLifeFreedom movement in Iran, and she has brought the human rights situation there into focus on the global stage, appearing before the UN Security Council and other forums.
This is the third year that Mercer University’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize has been run in partnership with Overland magazine. The prize, supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, seeks moving, powerful stories of up to 3000 words, themed loosely around the notion of travel. This year’s judges, Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop and Sara Saleh, selected a shortlist of eight stories from over 500 submissions. They have chosen a winner, who will receive $5000 in prize money, and two runners-up, who will each receive $750. The winning story will be published in Overland’s autumn issue, and the runners-up will have their stories published online.
In the early years of the prize, tens of thousands of dollars were awarded to scholars and students who sought illumination of the great issues of our times, from the search for a basis for peace to the need for better housing and medical care to the pursuit of civil liberties and the battle against discrimination based on the race, nationality or religion of people. The Foundation continues to work to illuminate these issues in new ways, with the hope that it can contribute to a more just and sane society.
The Foundation’s other prizes include the Sidney Edelstein Prize for a distinguished scholarly book on the history of technology, the Sally Hacker Prize for a distinguished non-technological work on the history of technology, the Abbot Payson Usher Prize, and the Joan Cahalin Robinson Dissertation Fellowship, as well as the Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow Levinson Prize for Aerospace History and the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize. For more information on these and other prizes and awards, please visit our various prize pages.