The Singapore Prize is a biennial award organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore to recognise outstanding published works in Chinese, English, Malay, and Tamil. It is the largest literary award in Singapore, and offers 12 top prizes for works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Previous winners include the authors of novels such as Ning Cai, Magic Babe Ning, and a collection of short stories written by Timothy P. Barnard and titled Impossible Bodies.
The prize is awarded by a five-member jury panel, including Mr Mahbubani; Prof John Miksic, Chair, Department of History, NUS; Dr Tan Tai Yong, President, Singapore University of Social Sciences; Prof Peter A. Coclanis, Director, Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and economist Dr Lam San Ling. Nominations are open to any author whose work deals with Singapore’s history, regardless of their citizenship or residency status. The prize money is $50,000 Singapore, and the winning work will be publicly announced and featured on the programme website.
A global environmental prize founded by Britain’s Prince William will hold its awards ceremony in Singapore on November 7. The Earthshot Prize was launched in 2020 to inspire optimism around the urgent challenges facing our planet, and to show that solutions do exist for restoring the world. The winners and finalists will receive up to $1 million to scale their environmental solutions.
In addition to the top prize, there are several sub-prizes that allow participants to showcase their ideas and innovations. The most prestigious of these is the Grand Prize, which offers an additional cash prize of $50,000 and a trophy. A second prize is the Audience Choice Award, which provides a $5,000 cash prize to the entry with the most votes from the public. The third prize is the MIT Media Lab Asia-Pacific Entrepreneurship Award, which offers a $10,000 cash prize to the entrant that has the best idea and business model.
The NUS Singapore History Prize was established in 2014 with an endowment from an anonymous donor. It is administered by the Department of History at NUS and is awarded every three years. The judging panel is composed of academics in the field of history, arts and cultural figures, museum curators, and history teachers and curriculum developers. The 2024 NUS Singapore History Prize shortlist includes non-fiction titles such as Leluhur: Singapore Kampong Gelam by Ms Hidayah Hijjas, and On the Ground: A History of an Estate in Sembawang by Kamaladevi Aravindan. It also includes Imperial Creatures by Timothy P. Barnard, which explores the relationship between humans and animals in colonial Singapore.
In the IT sector, Neo4j, an open source graph data platform that helps companies unlock the value of their big data, won the Most Innovative Graph Data Platform prize at the 2022 WSJ Tech Innovation Awards. It beat more than 100 other nominations from the US, Europe, and Japan to win this year’s award. The winner was chosen by a panel of judges from around the world.
