A Sidney Prize is a national competition to highlight the best in long-form essays. The award is presented annually by New York Times columnist David Brooks. Past winners include Hilton Als writing for The New Yorker and Ed Yong writing for The Atlantic, among others. Each year, Brooks solicits nominations from readers and then selects a few dozen essays that he believes are the very best of the year. The finalists are then published in an annual book.
The Sidney Awards, named for philosopher and physicist Sir Sydney Hook, are an annual literary prize awarded by the University of Melbourne to recognise and reward students for their written work. The awards are intended to encourage excellence in writing and to inspire new writers. The prize is a one-off cash award of up to $1000 and is awarded for work that demonstrates “beguiling imagery.” The winning essay is read at a public event.
Established in memory of the late Dr. Morris Wagman ’51, the trustees of the Sidney Myer Fund have made tens of thousands of dollars in grants to support scholarships, lecture series on college campuses, and research in medical and public health areas, and to honor his loyalty to high ideals. Deeply concerned with the responsibilities of a free press, the foundation also launched in 1950 the Hillman Prize program, which has honored contributors to the daily, periodical and labor presses, as well as authors and broadcasters.
In 2023, the judging panel chose Annie Zhang’s story ‘Who Rattles the Night?’ as the winner of the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. The story will be published in Overland’s autumn 2024 edition, and the runners-up will be published online. The prize was supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation and judged by Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop and Sara Saleh.
The Hillman Prizes illuminate the great issues of our time–from the search for a basis for lasting peace to the need for better housing, medical care and employment security for all people; the promotion of civil liberties; and the battle against discrimination based on race, nationality or religion. The foundation’s board includes left-leaning celebrities such as Danny Glover and former president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America labor union, which was a precursor to Unite Here and Workers United, SEIU. The Hillman Foundation also supports a monthly Sidney Award for investigative journalism that exposes social and economic injustices. The 2025 call for Hillman Prize entries is now closed. Please apply here for a reporting grant.