The Sidney Prize honors the work of writers and thinkers who push boundaries and break taboos. Winners receive a cash award, a commemorative certificate, and the opportunity to be featured on our website. Submissions may be essays, poems, plays, or scholarly books. Those selected will also be given the chance to present their work at our national conference.
Sidney Prizes are offered by the National Association of Scholars to recognize outstanding scholarship and intellectual achievement in a broad range of academic disciplines, including history, literature, religion, and philosophy. These awards are presented each year to authors of exemplary scholarship that is widely accessible and useful in teaching, research, or application.
For the fourth consecutive year, a book of poetry by the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer has won the Sidney Prize. Boyer’s work is lyrical and profound, evoking the landscape of the South, the psyche of her characters, and the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. Her book is called “Bitter” and was published by HarperOne.
Overland is pleased to announce the winners of the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and Judith Wright Poetry Prize. Writer, bookseller and co-founder of Vre Books Ender Baskan has won the $6,000 Neilma Sidney prize for his short story ‘are you ready?’ which was judged to be a ‘call to arms for artists and writers to make something dangerous and start an artist-writers league as a counter to precarity and professionalisation’. Two runners up, Miriam Webster for ‘New Directions in Anthropomorphism’ and Mikee Donato Sto Domingo for ‘Bite the Hand’ received $5000 each. Winners and runners up were chosen by a panel of judges, Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop, and Saraid Taylor. Their stories will be featured in Overland’s autumn 2024 issue.
The prestigious Hillman Foundation awards two prized journalism awards each year: the Sidney Hillman Prize for Social Justice Reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Writing About the Arts. The former prize, named after the foundation’s namesake, honors journalists who investigate the root causes of injustice. This year’s winner was Grant Robertson and Kathryn Blaze Baum, for their reporting of failures at the top of Canada’s food safety system that led to a listeria outbreak and avoidable deaths.
The latter prize was established in the memory of renowned playwright Sidney Howard. It was originally awarded by the New York based Playwrights’ Company in 1939 and was intended to support emerging talents. In his will Howard stipulated that the prize would go to a writer of fiction who demonstrates an “abundance of imaginative power and depth of vision.” Both of this year’s winners of the Hillman Prize, Ron Rash, and Steven Fraser—who wrote a biography of his namesake—are well deserving of their recognition. They will be presented with their prizes at a celebration in New York this spring. For more information, please visit the Hillman Foundation’s site here.