The winners of this year’s Singapore prize, an annual award for outstanding literary work, were announced on Thursday (December 12). A book by Straits Times journalist Akshita Nanda won the prize for English fiction. Her debut novel Nimita’s Place is about two women navigating societies’ expectations in India and Singapore. The non-fiction prize was shared by two authors: historian and NUS Asia Research Institute distinguished fellow Kishore Mahbubani for his memoir Living the Asian Century, and NUS Professor of Southeast Asia Studies Meira Chand for her SG50-centric book A History of Us.
The prizes were formally presented at a ceremony at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music. Besides the main prize categories, there was a Readers’ Favourite category for which over 3,000 people voted. The winners were violinists Dmytro Udovychenko, Anna Agafia Egholm and Angela Sin Ying Chan. The trio will perform concertos with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joshua Kangming Tan. The three also received USD $50,000, USD $25,000 and USD $110,000 in cash and multiple concert engagements respectively.
Other winners included Objectifs, a visual arts centre in Singapore, for its contribution to regional cinema. Taiwanese actors Lee Kang-Sheng and Yang Kuei-mei won the Screen Icon awards, while Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, who was recently freed from a 14-year travel ban, got the Cinema Honorary award.
During the week of thought leadership and innovation from 6 November, global leaders, businesses and investors will be in Singapore to explore new opportunities with TEP winners and finalists. This will include leveraging the prize’s ecosystem of partners committed to scalable solutions for humanity and our planet. The public will also get the chance to interact with and learn from these innovative solutions from our TEP finalists.
This year, the prize has partnered with Conservation International, which brings a wealth of experience in spotlighting and securing nature’s benefits for everyone. Through this partnership, the prize seeks to provide a catalyser to help accelerate the winning innovations and ensure their impacts are visible to the world.
The prize has a total of GBP 1 million (approximately USD 1.25 million or SGD 1.7 million) to act as a propeller to help the winning teams develop their ideas and take them to scale. The winners will receive the money, in addition to support and networking with the prize’s ecosystem of partners. This includes a unique global platform to share and accelerate their ideas with the wider community, and the opportunity for them to be mentored by leaders in the field. In addition, the prize will support the five winners to expand their work and take them to a new level of impact. Previously, the prize has supported work in fields such as medicine, engineering, space and the environment. It will continue to fund work in those areas as well as the arts and culture. It will also support a new theme, which will be unveiled in 2022. For more information, visit the website.