The sidney prize is an award given to a piece of writing that meets a certain set of standards. The awards are not given for any particular genre of writing, but rather for a piece of work that meets the high standard of integrity set by Sydney Cox in his teaching and book Indirections for Those Who Want to Write. These standards are based on the premise that all undergraduate writing is subject to a certain level of integrity, and that the writer is capable of writing well regardless of topic.

Ron Rash, a professor of Appalachian culture at Western Carolina University in North Carolina, has been awarded the 2020 Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature by Mercer University’s Spencer B. King Jr. Center for Southern Studies. The annual prize honors writers who engage and extend the tradition of writing about the American South. Rash is a poet, short story writer and novelist who has won numerous other literary prizes, including the O. Henry and Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prizes, and is a two-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award.

In the United States, the Sidney Hillman Foundation annually awards monetary prizes for journalism that “exemplifies the ideals of social justice and public policy for the common good.” Since 1950, the Hillman Prize program has honored contributors to the daily press, and in subsequent years photojournalism and opinion and analysis were added as prize categories. The foundation’s leadership includes the union leader and former president of Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, a precursor to Unite Here and Workers United (SEIU), Bruce Raynor.

Across the Pacific, the Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize is awarded for a story that explores the theme of travel in all its forms. The 2023 winner was Annie Zhang for her story ‘Who Rattles the Night?’, which was published in Overland this month. The judges praised the narrative’s eloquence and imagination in exploring a relationship forged between two strangers, while living on unceded Wangal land.

In addition to the Sydney Taylor book awards, AJL also administers several other major undergraduate literary prizes. For more information on these, please visit the AJL Scholarships and Prizes page. You can purchase gold and silver seals to place on your copy of a Sydney Taylor prize-winning book at the AJL shops page.