The Sidney Prize and the Harvey Goldberg Prize
Sidney prize is a national award that honors distinguished scholarship, undergraduate teaching, and leadership in the cause of liberal arts education. The award is named in honor of the distinguished American philosopher and Phi Beta Kappa member Sidney Hook. The Society announces the winner of this prize every three years and invites nominations from its members in the Key Reporter, General Newsletter, and social media. The prize is presented at the Society’s Triennial Council Meeting. Nominations will be accepted beginning a year and a half prior to the Council Meeting.
This year’s judging panel selected Annie Zhang for her story ‘Who Rattles the Night?’, which was published in Overland. She is a writer and editor living on unceded Wangal land and was a 2018 Western Sydney Emerging Writer Fellow. Her work has appeared in publications including Island, Kill Your Darlings and the Big Issue. She will receive a prize of $5000 and two runners-up will have their stories published online.
A prize that is all about legacy — the passing on of intellectual curiosity from one generation to the next. The Sidney Iwanter Prize was founded in 2000 by alumnus Sidney E. Iwanter (B.A. ’71, History) and is named in his memory. The prize reflects Iwanter’s commitment to the preservation of knowledge and his desire to pass it on. He secretly recorded many of his Professor of History Harvey Goldberg’s lectures while he was at UW-Madison, and later donated the “bootlegs” to the Harvey Goldberg Center.
One of the most exciting aspects of the Sidney Prize is recognizing those who can see clearly what others miss. In his essay “The End,” Michael Lewis lauds Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman, the financial analysts who understood at an early stage that the global finance system was a doomsday machine. These “Sidney Prize winners,” as he calls them, can see the future when most others are caught in a fog of delusion.
In a world full of phony news and politicians who lie to advance their careers, we need more people like the winners of this year’s Sidney prizes. This includes journalists who aren’t afraid to go where other reporters fear to go, such as investigating how states treat low-income taxpayers when they request access to their tax records. Reporters Maya Srikrishnan and Ashley Clarke spent more than a year pursuing their story, interviewing low-income taxpayer clinic attorneys across the country and surveying all 50 states on how they respond to such requests.
The 2023 Neilma Sidney Prize is awarded to Annie Zhang for her story ‘Who Rattles The Night?’. She is a writer and editor living in unceded Wangal land and was an Emerging Writer Fellow at Overland in 2019. Her work has appeared in Islands, Kill Your Darlings and the Big issue. She will receive a prize of $5,000 and the two runners-up will have their stories published in the Autumn 2024 edition of Overland. They will also be eligible for consideration for the upcoming Australian History Prize and New South Wales History Prize.