The Ning Cai Singapore Prize is one of the top prizes awarded to books in the country. It is a biennial award that honors strong work in Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. The prize has 12 categories, ranging from non-fiction to poetry and fiction. The award is backed by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and the National Library Board. The prize was created in 2021 and is named after a Singapore-born author and former UN ambassador who died in 2010.
The prize is awarded to a work that best exemplifies the spirit of Singapore, according to organizers. It comes with a cash prize of $33,000 and a trophy. The winner is also eligible for standard Tour event benefits, including season exemptions and berths in key events.
A housing complex for seniors has beaten off flashier projects from around the world to win this year’s coveted prize from the World Architecture Festival (WAF). The Kampung Admiralty project in Singapore topped hundreds of buildings to take the title of “World Building of the Year.” The accolade was announced in Amsterdam on Friday. The project is the third in a series of community or public buildings to claim the prize in recent years, after an earthquake-reconstruction project in China and an extension to a museum in Poland.
The 2021 prize, which is supported by the National Book Development Council of Singapore and National Library Board, was open to book-length works on any period, theme or field of Singapore history that are published in English from January 2017 onwards. The prize committee also wished to encourage submissions which widened the range of audiences interested in Singapore history and which challenge the perception of history as solely a record of great movers and shakers.
The panel of judges for the 2021 prize – consisting of NUS professors Kuo-Kin Tiang and Peter Miksic, as well as scholars from other universities in Singapore – also chose non-fiction work with a personal slant. This includes Leluhur: Singapore’s Kampong Glam by Hidayah Amin, whose book shines a light on the area that many people now know only as a tourist attraction. In addition to the main category, a Readers’ Favorite exercise will return for the first time this year, with readers voting online for their favorite shortlisted book in each of the four languages. The winner of each language will receive $1,000 Singapore dollars, or US$720. This is Publishing Perspectives’ 131st awards-related report in our ongoing coverage of the global book industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find all our previous reports here. You can also subscribe to the newsletter here. And don’t forget to check out our new podcast!
