The Sidney Prize and Hillman Awards Announce Winners
The sidney prize is a long-form literary prize that celebrates work that is difficult to fit into a small space. The prize honors writing that stands athwart technology, yelling stop. The prize seeks to celebrate work that resists being reduced to a tweet or an op-ed, that refuses to submit to the demands of the marketplace.
The winner will receive $5000, with two runners-up receiving $750 each. The judging panel, which included Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop and Sara Saleh, reviewed more than 500 entries. The shortlisted writers will have their stories published in Overland’s autumn 2024 edition, along with a highly commended story.
In addition to the Hillman Prizes, the Foundation will continue its monthly Sidney Awards. The Sidney Awards are open to journalists globally for any published reporting that exemplifies investigative journalism with deep storytelling skill and social justice impact. Winners will be announced on the second Wednesday of each month, and will receive a $500 honorarium and a certificate designed by New Yorker cartoonist Edward Sorel.
In this month’s prize announcement, the judges chose a piece that explores how the family home becomes a battleground in an ongoing struggle to survive. This story combines the personal and political in ways that remind us of how difficult it can be to make the right choice, even when we know the consequences.
We hope that this essay encourages readers to step back from the current political fracas and consider the bigger picture. Walter Russell Mead’s take on “The Once and Future Liberalism” does exactly that, arguing that the current debate in the U.S is actually a conflict between two very different visions of liberalism—the small-state Manchester liberalism of the 1890s and the big organization managerial state liberalism that dominates today.
We are also delighted to announce that art history major Sophia Jactel (B.A. ’20) has won the Sidney Thomas Prize for her paper “Domesticity and Diversions: Josef Israels’ The Smoker as a Symbol of Peasant Culture in Nineteenth-Century Holland.” The prize recognizes outstanding undergraduate art history papers that contribute to scholarship in a particular field. This year’s winning essay was based on research from the collections of Syracuse University Art Galleries.