Singapore Prize Winners Announced
Singapore Prize, an award to recognize individuals for their kindness and consideration for others, was recently announced at an extravagant ceremony featuring singers One Republic and Bebe Rexha as well as actor Sterling K. Brown among other celebrity presenters. Additionally, an eco-friendly green carpet made an appearance; Prince William donned an Alexander McQueen dark green blazer while other attendees donned eco-friendly gowns during this memorable night of recognition.
In the literature category, over half of the shortlisted writers are debut authors in Chinese or Tamil. Two nonagenarian winners – Suratman Markesan from Malay creative nonfiction and Wang Gungwu from English creative nonfiction both aged 91 – both received honorable mention in different categories; Markesan being honored with readers’ choice award for Honing the Pen, Volume 2.
Singaporean poet Edwin Thumboo became a first-time winner in the poetry category with his memoir Those Who Have Known Me, detailing life in slums. Yeow Kai Chai took second place for her book Orchid Folios which tells stories from Singaporeans living during the 1960s and ’70s; third prize went to Mok Zining with her work The Great Wall of China in Mandarin fiction category.
Clara Chow is one of five writers shortlisted in two or more categories, making history by being nominated in three of four language groups and finalist for both English fiction and creative nonfiction as well as Chinese poetry – winning readers’ choice award in all three.
AI Singapore is proud to present the Online Safety Prize Challenge – a 10-week competition designed to advance AI research in developing multimodal, multilingual, zero-shot models that accurately distinguish benign from harmful memes within Singapore’s diverse and nuanced digital landscape. Our aim is to facilitate safer interactions worldwide; particularly those regions lacking data about harmful content.
The awards are administered by the National University of Singapore’s Department of History, with submissions open to publications covering any time period or topic related to Singaporean history. The 2024 award will be announced in May; for more information visit the NUS Singapore History Prize website.