Singapore Prize Winners Announced
The winning punters in the latest Toto draw will share a prize pool of over $10 million after the jackpot snowballed to its current level. The last three draws saw no Group 1 winners, and the jackpot has since grown to more than $5 million. The next draw will take place on Thursday (May 9).
The Singapore Prize has been awarded to authors for their books that have made a significant contribution to the understanding of our nation’s history. It is a biennial book award presented by the National Book Development Council of Singapore. It aims to promote and reward high quality books written in the four official languages of Singapore: Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. This year’s prize has been expanded to include fiction and non-fiction, as well as two runner-up prizes of $5,000 each.
Kishore Mahbubani, the distinguished NUS Asia Research Institute professor who mooted the idea for the prize in a Straits Times column, says: “A famous American social scientist once said that nations are ’imagined communities’ and a shared imagination — especially of their past — is a critical glue holding them together today. History is the great storehouse of our collective memory.”
In its inaugural year, the prize was awarded to NUS historian Prof John Miksic for his work Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea: 1300-1800, which outlines the island’s early history and its place in the Asian region. The jury said it was a “fundamental reinterpretation” of the city’s history.
Other contenders in the competition included New York-based author Jeremy Tiang’s Sembawang: The Untold Stories of a Singapore District, which looks at the 1950s when the future seemed up for grabs. Another shortlisted work was Leluhur: A Tale of Kampong Gelam by Hidayah Amin, who grew up in the heritage royal building Gedung Kuning in the heart of the old town. Her story illuminates the lives of residents in a part of town many now know as a tourist attraction.
Non-fiction entries also featured a personal slant. One was a memoir by 74-year old Chui Seng Wah, who won a Special Mention for his entry that documents his father’s journey from a rural village in China to become a master tailor in Singapore. Another was the memoir of a former politician, whose experiences in the turbulent 1970s inspired his family to become involved in leftist political movements and were eventually arrested.
Celebrities including actress Cate Blanchett, actor Donnie Yen and Australian wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin joined Britain’s Prince William to walk the green carpet at the third Earthshot Prize awards ceremony in Singapore on Tuesday (May 8). The prince congratulated the five winning teams, who are tackling environmental challenges such as protecting the oceans, improving air quality, reducing food waste and making electric car batteries more sustainable. The five winners received a total of $1 million in catalytic funding to scale up their environmental solutions. The ceremony was held at the Mediacorp Theatre.