The NUS Singapore History Prize aims to foster greater engagement with Singapore’s historical past by broadening its appeal and scope, including works that address Singapore’s place in the world or other non-academic histories. According to its founder Kishore Mahbubani a former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani the greatest challenge facing Singapore today in 21st century is not economic but in creating an inclusive sense of national identity through shared history.
At an awards ceremony with celebrity hosts Cate Blanchett, Donnie Yen, and Lana Condor as hosts, Prince Michael presented five winners whose solutions ranged from developing cleaner lithium-ion batteries for electric cars to tightening marine enforcement to curb illegal fishing and protect ocean conservation. Prince Michael told them their innovations showed “the light of optimism is still burning bright” even as climate change threatens global poverty and hunger.
Peter Ellinger of National University of Singapore Professor Emeritus won in the English debut category with Down Memory Lane: The Memoirs (2023). Judges described it as an intricate, personal, political, historical and sociocultural story “woven together with beautiful coherence”. Cockman (2022), which follows an alien chicken as it seeks refuge on Earth as human form was awarded its inaugural English comic or graphic novel prize for its “total lack of seriousness and compromise and over-the-top audacity”.
Tonight (August 25), the 2024 Singapore Literature Prize will be revealed, offering 12 top prizes of up to $10,000 in Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil literature categories – for the first time since its creation – both fiction and non-fiction are competing equally in each.
One of the finalists will receive an additional prize from the United Nations Population Fund: an award of $50,000 that will enable him or her to continue work on creating a mobile application that helps women understand gender biases in family planning decisions. Furthermore, they will also be provided a stipend and laptop in partnership with a local IT company to develop this app together.
The 2022 Singapore Literary Prize is the sixth biennial award honoring Singaporean literature, organized jointly by the National Book Council of Singapore and Arts Council of Singapore. Open to writers of any ethnicity writing in any of Singapore’s four official languages – Chinese, English, Malay or Tamil – published between January and December 2022, there have been eight nominations received this year and three will be selected by an expert panel as finalists for consideration.