Singapore Prize Winners Announced

The Singapore Prize (SGP) is an award administered by the National University of Singapore for published works on Singapore history, in any language. The SGP aims to recognise the importance of Singapore’s rich history, promote awareness of its significance and encourage scholarship on Singapore’s past. It is a biennial award, with prizes in the Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil languages.

The first SGP was launched in 2014 to celebrate SG50, in support of the scholarly pursuit of Singapore’s history. Archaeologist Prof Miksic was the inaugural winner, for his book, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800. He said the prize had come at an important time when Singaporeans were reassessing the country’s place in the Asian context.

He added that the SGP had inspired him to continue to work on his own “fundamental reinterpretation of our identity” and the ways in which Singaporeans understood themselves. He said the question of where Singapore began had never really been answered, and he believed his book would help answer this for future generations.

Prof Miksic, 71, first came to Singapore in 1984 to conduct archaeological tests on Fort Canning. He now teaches at the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies. He said his winning the prize was “a huge surprise”.

Other winners included 91-year-old University of Chicago professor emeritus Peter Ellinger, for his memoir Down Memory Lane: The Memoirs of an American Historian. He is the oldest person to win the prize, and the only person to have won it twice. Ellinger’s win for his second book, The Way Home (2023), was for his recollections of the racial integration of Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s.

Artist Shubigi Rao, whose Pulp III: An Intimate Inventory of the Banished Book project won the 2022 Singapore Literature Prize, was also a winner in the English creative non-fiction category. Her work is a critical, wittily and poetically scrutinised account of histories and lies, literature and violence, ecologies and natural history, libraries and knowledge death.

A total of 12 top prizes were awarded, with the highest winner receiving $100,000. The remaining nine top winners will receive cash prizes and a trophy. The runner-up in each category will receive $20,000. People can vote for their favourite books by filling out a ballot form at all Singapore Pools outlets until October 2nd. There is a one-in-eleven chance of winning a prize.

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