The Sydney prize is an annual award given by the Sydney Mechanics School of Arts to students completing senior units in Australian literature. The prize includes an individual award ($60,000), a group award (up to $90,000) and a Facilitator’s Prize ($25,000). The Sidney Myer Foundation is proud of the achievements of its prize winners who work tirelessly to make a difference to their audiences. The foundation believes that its work is important and has a positive effect on society.
Established in honor of the late Sidney Cox, a distinguished professor of English at Hamilton College, the prize is awarded to that undergraduate piece of writing that most nearly meets those high standards of originality and integrity which Cox set for himself and his students both inside and outside the classroom. It is a prize for overall excellence in an undergraduate honors program and, in particular, for the most effective exploration of feelings through language.
In 2023, over 500 stories were entered in this year’s Neilma Sidney Short Story Competition. A panel of judges from Overland and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation selected eight pieces to make it to the shortlist and chose a winner and two runners up, who will be published online and in Overland’s autumn 2024 edition.
For the second time in three years, the sidney prize has gone to a story that illuminates great issues of our time, through research and deep reporting. This year’s winning entry, “Low-Income Taxpayers Get Less Help From the IRS,” by Maya Srikrishnan and Ashley Clarke of Public Integrity, shined a light on the ways in which state policies and practices affect low-income taxpayers. The work was the result of a long-term commitment to find new avenues for telling the story as states stifled access to information by stalling or quoting fees for data requests, and by interviewing low-income taxpayer clinic lawyers in every state with an income tax.
“Nazanin Boniadi is a true human rights activist, who is leading a courageous fight for the right to freedom and safety of Iranian women,” said Lord Mayor Clover Moore. “I am very pleased to be able to present her with the Sydney Peace Prize on behalf of the City of Sydney. We wish her every success as she continues to turn outrage into action.”
The runner-up in the 2023 sidney prize was “Bridging the Gap” by Sophie Jactel of Art History, for her paper on Josef Israels’s Smoker as a Symbol of Peasant Culture and Home in Nineteenth-Century Holland. The judges of the prize commended the winner and runner-up for their outstanding contributions to our understanding of how people connect with one another through language.
The Sydney Peace Prize, first awarded in 2014, recognizes a person or organisation that has promoted “peace with justice”, the promotion of human rights and the fight against discrimination on the basis of race, religion or gender. The judging panel for the 2023 Sydney Peace Prize included Professor Sir Zeti Afshar, Chair of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty.
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