The Winners of the Sydney Prize in 2023, Walter Mead and Neilma Sidney Prizes

The Sydney Prize is awarded annually to outstanding writing in English by a resident of NSW. It is open to all writers at any stage of their careers. Its aim is to encourage writing of high literary standard and to foster a culture of reading in the state. It also provides a platform for emerging writers to demonstrate their talents and potential. In addition to the main prize, there are several smaller prizes for the best entries in specific categories. These include the Event Cinemas Rising Talent Award and the Screen NSW Short Film Prize.

Winners will receive a cash prize of $11,000 plus their work published in the Sydney Prize anthology. Winners will also receive a ticket to the 2025 Sydney Prize launch.

This year’s winners were chosen by an international panel of judges. Judges were drawn from academic, media and industry backgrounds. The jury said: “We have been impressed by the high quality of the entries submitted for this year’s competition, which range from the highly personal and intimate to the global in scope. The stories are not only thought provoking, but also incredibly well written and deeply empathetic. We are pleased to be able to award these three distinguished writers with the Sydney Prize.”

In the essay category, Stephen Miescher of Stanford University won the 2023 Sidney prize for his book, A Dam for Africa: The Construction of a Modern Political Economy in Ghana (Indiana University Press, 2022). He was honoured for a study that is a landmark in the history of technology and an essential contribution to the field of African studies. The prestigious Walter Russell Mead Prize was awarded to Dr Kate Carte of Southern Methodist University for her book Religion and the American Revolution: An Imperial History (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2021).

A short story by Annie Zhang, who lives on unceded Wangal land, won the Neilma Sidney prize in the fiction category. Her story, ‘Who Rattles the Night?’, deals with a couple’s struggle to live with ghosts in their new home. The winner was congratulated for her “extraordinary imagination and fearlessness”.

Overland magazine has announced that it will again award the Neilma Sidney Prize in the short fiction category. The prize is open to all writers nationally and internationally, at any stage of their writing career. The winning entry will be published in Overland and two runners-up will receive $750 each. Entries should be no more than 3000 words and be themed around the notion of ‘travel’. Writers can take out a subscription to Overland for one year at the special subscriber rate, and this will automatically entitle them to enter the competition. The deadline for the submissions is March 31. The winner will be announced in April. The full details of the competition are available here.