The Singapore Prize is an biennial award that honors outstanding published works written in Singapore’s four official languages – Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. This year’s ceremony featured 12 winners for fiction, non-fiction and poetry across its 12 categories as well as readers’ choice awards based on consumer votes online.
Poetry awards went to alllkunila (Azhagunila), innnpa (Inbha), and rma cureess (Rama Suresh). Other inaugural poetry winners were Julian Wong’s Hang Jie, Jee Leong Koh and Suratman Markasan; Wang Gungwu and Yeow Kai Chai won again.
Earthshot Week will accompany this year’s Singapore Prize ceremony for the third consecutive time, to encourage global leaders, businesses and investors to join a 10-year mission of finding 50 solutions to urgent climate change challenges and funding them over 10 years. Furthermore, Singapore can use Earthshot Week as an opportunity to demonstrate itself as an innovative hub with innovators, entrepreneurs and community leaders who are dedicated to saving our planet.
The NUS Singapore History Prize, first established in 2014, recognizes books written about Singaporean history by either local writers or writers of any nationality. 2021’s winner, Leluhur: Singapore Kampong Gelam was described by its judges as being both elegantly written and primary in nature due to Ms Hidayah’s input as primary source material. They wanted this prize to demonstrate that writing history books does not require professional historians.
On December 14th, the winners of the 2022 Singapore International Violin Competition were revealed in its grand final round. Violinists Dmytro Udovychenko, Anna Agafia Egholm and Angela Sin Ying Chan performed concertos for Joshua Kangming Tan’s Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted by them, receiving USD $110,000 as prizes and multiple concert engagements along with these prizes.
Professor Liu Zheng of NTU’s School of Materials Science and Engineering made history this week when he won the Apec Aspire Science Prize, becoming the first Singaporean to do so for his research on an affordable, eco-friendly material used for green hydrogen energy or semiconductor manufacturing. Beating out 15 other nominees from 21 Apec member nations was no easy feat, yet this accolade honors both his work and commitment to his region. He told The Straits Times this award honours both.
Grace Chia, the poet whose poetry collection Cordelia wasn’t chosen as one of two co-winners for English Poetry category at 2022 Singapore Literature Prize but did win readers’ choice award, took to social media in protest at jury sexism. Chia posted her speech before quickly removing it on Facebook before making further accusations that this prize is biased toward male narratives of poetic discourse which creates undue privilege for women writers. Later she resigned her poetry judge role for this year’s prize.