Britain’s Prince William attended the Singapore Prize awards ceremony Tuesday, which honors green innovators who are working on projects ranging from making electric car batteries cleaner to boosting marine enforcement to deter illegal fishing and support ocean conservation. The award was launched in 2020 by his Royal Foundation charity, and the winners — including a maker of solar-powered dryers and a soil carbon marketplace, as well as a non-profit that restores Andean forests and another that boosts marine enforcement to deter illegal fishing — are helping to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental challenges.
The winners of the 2023 biennial Singapore prize are based on 12 categories in the island nation’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. This year, there were 43 winners across the categories, half of which are first-time winners. Two 91-year-olds, Suratman Markasan in the Malay category and Wang Gungwu in the English, made history as the oldest winners of the award by scooping top prizes in their respective genres. Both wrote in creative nonfiction. Besides the top winners, there were also seven finalists who won a special commendation.
In the fiction category, the top winner was the debut novel Snow at 5 PM: Translations of an Insignificant Japanese Poet by Jee Leong Koh. The novel was published by the National Book Development Council of Singapore. The judges praised the work as an “insightful and poetic portrayal of a family’s struggle to make sense of a complex situation,” and said that the story is told through a “stunningly lyrical and often humorous narrative.”
Continuing the literary trend, two authors clinched both the Readers’ Choice and the Singapore Heritage Prize this year. The first was the poetry collection The Other Side of the Bridge by rma cureess (Rama Suresh). The other was the unfinished novel Ponti by Sharlene Wen-Ning Teo, a former lawyer who won the Deborah Rogers Writers’ Award, which offers a PS10,000 grant to help writers complete their first books. Ian McEwan read an excerpt from Teo’s book at the event and described it as “a remarkable first novel in the making.”
Also at the awards, the NUS Singapore History Prize was presented to Professor John Miksic of NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies for his work Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea: 1300 – 1800. The book provides archaeological evidence that Singapore’s story began more than 700 years ago. It is the first book devoted to the country’s history to win this prize, which was introduced in 2014 in support of the programs marking the nation’s 50th anniversary. It is administered by NUS’ Department of History.
