The Sidney Prize is a monthly award that honors journalism in service of social justice. Winners exemplify investigative reporting and deep storytelling while making a difference in our society. The prize is open to journalists worldwide. The winner is announced each month, and the winning work is published on our website. The prize is not a cash award, but instead consists of a $500 honorarium for the journalist and a $2,000 grant for their organization to use for the furtherance of social justice. The winner is chosen from submissions received by the deadline.

The 2024 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize is proudly sponsored by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation and Overland magazine. Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop and Sara Saleh were our judges for this year’s competition, and they have now chosen a winner, along with two runners-up, who will all be published in Overland’s autumn issue in 2024.

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day minutia of politics and lose sight of our larger responsibilities. It is even more important at this moment in history to step back and think about the bigger picture. Walter Russell Mead’s recent essay “The Once and Future Liberalism” in the American Interest offers one such perspective.

In this piece, Mead argues that the current political argument is a conflict between two competing versions of liberalism—the small state Manchester liberalism of the 1890s and the big organization managerial-state liberalism of the 1950s. He contends that the latter is the more likely heir to our national identity, which is founded on the ideal of equality and liberty for all.

Sophia Jactel’s paper “Domesticity and Diversions: Josef Israels’ The Smoker as a Symbol of Peasant Culture and the Role of the Home in Nineteenth-Century Holland” won the Sidney prize for best art history undergraduate paper. Sophia, an art history major, worked with professor Sally Cornelison to research the print and co-curate a fall exhibition on domesticity and the role of the house in Dutch culture.

For the second consecutive year, the Sidney and Victoria Prize for Undergraduate Writing is awarded to a paper written by an undergraduate student on a topic related to the themes of the journal. The prize was established in memory of the late professors Sydney and Victoria Cox and is supported by the Wittenberg East Asian Studies Program.

The 2025 Sidney and Victoria Prize for Undergraduate writing is supported by the Sidney DeVere Brown Prize, and the Mikiso Hane Prize. This annual competition seeks to reward outstanding papers composed by undergraduate students, and to encourage the development of scholarship in this field. The first place winner receives a $100 prize and will have their paper published in the journal. Two runners-up will each be awarded $50.

From the beginning, the Sydney Taylor Book Awards Committee has also designated Notable Books. A new list is publicized each year at the same time as the list of prize winners. Please check the individual prize pages for more information about nominations for these lists.