The Sidney Prize is awarded annually for journalism that uncovers social injustices. Winners receive a cash prize and an engraved medallion from the Hillman Foundation. The organization also gives awards to scholarly and public works projects that uncover social injustices. It is named for the film and stage actor who starred in movies such as Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
The 2023 Sidney prize was awarded to journalist Michael Lewis for an article titled “The End.” Lewis describes how people like Meredith Whitney and Steve Eisman understood that the U.S. financial system was headed for a disastrous collapse while most people were blind to the danger. His piece was a warning to the nation and was published in Portfolio magazine.
Another Sidney prize was awarded to a group of journalists for their work on state income taxes. Maya Srikrishnan and Ashley Clarke worked on this piece for over a year, doggedly seeking new avenues to tell the story as they faced repeated obstacles from states that blocked data requests or quoted outrageously high fees for data. The piece was a joint project by Grist and The Washington Post, and was published in both print and online.
The 2024 Sidney prize was awarded to physicist and author Jeremy Fox for his book, The Unreliable Nation: The Cold War Origins of Nuclear Weapons. The prize was presented by AIP and the Sidney Hook Memorial Fund. The selection committee praised the work for its unique approach to connecting art, media and literature with science.
AIP also awarded the 2024 Andrew Gemant Award to physics professor and author Sidney Perkowitz for his efforts to bridge science with the arts and humanities. The selection committee commended him for his long-standing commitment to the humanistic dimension of physics and for his many contributions in this area.
In addition to the Sidney Prize, the Hillman Foundation also awards several other prizes each year. The 2025 awards include the U.S Hillman Prizes and the Canada Hillman Prize. The foundation also honors a distinguished scholar with the Sidney Hook Memorial Award, which recognizes national distinction in scholarship, undergraduate teaching, and leadership in the cause of liberal arts education.
The Neilma Sidney Short Fiction Prize is an annual literary prize that seeks outstanding original short fiction of up to 3000 words themed loosely around the notion of travel. The judges for the 2023 competition were Patrick Lenton, Alice Bishop and Sara Saleh, who shortlisted eight pieces from over 500 entries and chose a winner and two runners-up. The winning entry was Annie Zhang’s ‘Who Rattles the Night?’, which was published by Overland. Zhang is a writer living on unceded Wangal land and was a WestWords Western Sydney Emerging Writer Fellow in 2019. The Overland Neilma Sidney Prize is supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation and a generous grant from the Sidney Hook Memorial Fund. The full shortlist of eight is available on the Overland website.