The Sidney Prize is awarded monthly to an outstanding piece of journalism that exposes social injustice. It’s named after the 19th-century Georgia writer Sidney Lanier, who wrote “The Song of the Chattahoochee” and “The Marshes of Glynn.” The prize illuminates the great issues of our day: peace, economic justice for all, the preservation of civil liberties, and the battle against discrimination based on race, class, and religion.
The prize was first established in 1967 with a gift from the estate of Philip Sidney Ardern, professor of English at Dartmouth College from 1927 to 1952. It was endowed by his former students and friends, and administered by a committee of which Robert Frost ’96 and A. B. Guthrie are honorary chairmen, and Budd Schulberg ’36 is active chairman. The Prize was originally to stimulate the study of Old and Middle English, but in recent years it has been enlarged to embrace all areas of literary study.
This year, several writers have won Sidneys for their work examining the intersection of science and society. For example, last summer and fall intellectual heavyweights Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier went toe-to-toe in The New Republic over the proper role of science in modern thought. Wieseltier took the narrow view that science should confine itself to what can be measured, while Pinker argued that, despite what blinkered humanities professors might say, science provides insight into nearly everything.
Other winners have addressed the issue of climate change, racial and sexual equality, and the rise of populism. And one of our favorite Sidneys of the year goes to Michael Lewis, who wrote about Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman, two financial analysts who understood early on that the U.S. financial system was a doomsday machine and warned the public.
Overland’s 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize winner is Annie Zhang for her story, ‘Who Rattles the Night?’. She is a writer and editor living on unceded Wangal land, and was a WestWords Western Sydney Emerging Writer Fellow in 2019. Her story follows a couple who learn to live with ghosts in their new home.
The Neilma Sidney Prize is open to all writers, nationally and internationally, at any stage in their writing career. Its judges, Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop and Sara Saleh, selected a shortlist of eight stories from over 500 submissions. The winning story will receive $5000 and be published in Overland, and two runners-up will be published online. For more information, click here. Subscribers are eligible to enter the contest at a discounted rate. Non-subscribers may pay the regular entry fee of $20. Submissions are due by the last Wednesday of each month. (Nominations for previous months are now closed.) Winners are announced the second Wednesday of each month. Click here for more information about the contest and how to submit your nomination.