The Sidney Prize is awarded annually to a graduate student or early career scholar whose work in the field of the history of technology has shown extraordinary promise. The award is named in honor of a long-time SHOT member, Sidney Edelstein.
Whether it’s a rethinking of the foundational principles of democracy or an analysis of the long-term harms of hook-up culture, this year’s winners highlight the importance of looking at the big picture—and of not ignoring important context.
In a piece for Portfolio magazine, Michael Lewis writes about the “Sidney Award”: “This prize is given to people who see reality clearly when everyone else is lost in a fog of delusion.” Lewis is referring to financial analysts Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman, who understood before anyone else that the U.S. financial system had become a doomsday machine.
A bequest established by the late Isabel B. Oberman in 1973 provides for annual awards to the best papers by students of law at Harvard writing on one of seven current legal subjects: Bankruptcy; Constitutional Law and Equal Justice Under the Law; Family Law; Intellectual Property; Labor and Employment Law; and Law and History. To view the list of previous winners and finalists, see the Irving Oberman Memorial Awards webpage.
To order gold or silver seals to place on your copies of winning titles or to purchase a Sydney Taylor Book Award poster, please scroll down to the bottom of this page. You can also find information on the award’s history, past winners and rules and regulations.
The 2024 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize, sponsored by Overland, seeks excellent short fiction of up to 3000 words themed loosely around the notion of travel; imaginative, creative and literary interpretations are encouraged. The winner will receive $5000, and their story will be published in Overland. Two runners-up will each receive $750. Entry is $12 for subscribers and $20 for non-subscribers, but you can take out a special prize subscription—for $62 you get discounted entry, plus a four-issue subscription to Overland, which includes access to our daily online magazine and invitations to subscriber events, opportunities and giveaways.
HUMBOLDT AWARDS
The Humboldt Awards are the most prestigious prizes for fiction, nonfiction and poetry in the world. The awards are given each year to the authors of outstanding work that makes a profound contribution to human knowledge and understanding. Applicants must be nominated by someone else, and each year the award committee selects works of particular merit from among the nominations. The awards are given by the prestigious Humboldt Foundation in Berlin, Germany. The prize has been in existence since 1996, and is awarded in the name of Nobel laureate physicist Wilhelm von Humboldt. In addition, the Foundation also gives out a number of smaller awards to encourage young writers and support literary research. The awards are known as the “Sidney Awards” in the United States and Canada. The foundation has also created the Hillman Prize for Journalism in Service of the Common Good, a monthly award given to journalists who report on social justice issues in traditional and new media forms.
