The SS Sidney Prize and Other Awards For Students
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The Sydney Prize provides students with an exciting way to have their hard work acknowledged and rewarded, building their confidence while giving them a sense of achievement. Available to all types of students across all subject areas, judges evaluate applicants each month before awarding prizes; winners receive an engraved trophy designed by New Yorker cartoonist Edward Sorel to commemorate their win.
The SS Sidney Prize was created in 2007 and supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation. It seeks original, powerful short fiction up to 3000 words long with travel themes as a loose theme. The winning entry will receive $5000 while two runners up will be published in Overland magazine. For the 2021 competition, judges were Julie Koh, Alice Robinson and Mykaela Saunders.
This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to two US scientists, Sidney Altman and Thomas Cech. Their groundbreaking discovery that an RNA molecule – once thought only as an essential genetic code carrier – can act as a biocatalyst is enormously significant and has implications in multiple fields including biology, medicine and agriculture.
Other awards, like the SS Sydney Prize, recognize writers and journalists who write about issues that impact people’s daily lives. This year, it was awarded to Amanda Hess for her article on online sexism as well as to David Brooks and William Zinser who examined student hypersensitivity which can cause mental health problems and hinder adaptation to real-life situations.
Alongside the SS Sydney Prize, students may also apply for other scholarships and awards such as Neilma Sydney Prize which encourages young people to make social change happen and make an impactful statement about life today. Sydney Jewish Museum also offers awards for Holocaust history essays while The Sydney Black Memorial Engineering Prize seeks to encourage female engineers.
SS Sydney Prize can be an enormously fulfilling experience and also provides students with an excellent way to have their work published and recognized. Open to aspiring authors from any discipline, the competition is judged by an esteemed panel. The winning entry will be published in Overland magazine with several others featured online for reading on Overland website; past submissions have even gone on to be published later with special seals to promote it further – submissions for 2023’s round will open soon!