The Sidney Prize For Bold, Cutting Edge and Courageous Writing
The Sidney prize is a series of awards for writing that is bold, cutting edge and courageous. It stands athwart technology, yelling stop, and celebrates long-form journalism and thought. It is a prize that encourages us to step back at this time of year and look at the bigger picture. Walter Russell Mead’s “The Once and Future Liberalism” in the American Interest certainly does that.
It is a prize that rewards writers who do something that makes you want to read their work, whether it’s a essay, an op-ed or a blog post. It is a prize that celebrates a writer who takes the trouble to think deeply and well, then puts their thoughts down on paper. And in this age of short attention spans, the prize is an important one to win.
The prize is named after the late Professor Sidney Cox, who taught English at Dartmouth from 1927 to 1952. The prize is offered annually for a piece of undergraduate writing that most nearly meets the high standard of originality and integrity that Professor Cox set for his students and himself. Students from all fields of study may apply, and the work need not be written in English. The submission is judged by a committee of former professors and students, of which Robert Frost and A. B. Guthrie are honorary chairmen and Budd Schulberg is active chairman.
Since 1950, the Sidney Hillman Foundation has honored and encouraged investigative reporting by honoring contributors to the daily, periodical, labor press, and authors. Deeply concerned with the responsibilities of a free press, the foundation launched the Hillman Prize program to encourage investigative journalism and deep storytelling in service of the common good.
The Hillman Foundation has made tens of thousands of grants, including a significant number to support the work of journalists who were also recipients of the Sidney Prize. The fund has also supported lecture series and scholarship programs for college students, and the creation of libraries of rare books in the humanities and social sciences.
Each year, the society for the history of technology selects a book that has made a significant contribution to research in the field of the history of science and technology. The book is awarded the Sidney Edelstein Prize, which carries with it a $3,500 cash award and a plaque.
The 2023 Neilma Sidney short story prize was won by Annie Zhang for her story ‘Who Rattles the Night?’. Zhang is a writer and editor living on unceded Wangal land, and was a WestWords Western Sydney Emerging Writer Fellow in 2019. Her story will be published by Overland and the two runners-up will have their stories published online. See our various prize pages for submission details. The deadline for nominations is 15 May 2025. We are currently accepting nominations for the Leonardo da Vinci Prize, Melvin Kranzberg Dissertation Fellowship, Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize, Samuel Eleazar and Rose Tartakow History of Technology Prize, and the Bernard S. Finn IEEE History Prize.
