The 2015 Singapore Prize Winners
The Singapore Prize is a biennial award program with 12 categories, recognizing writers in Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. This year’s theme is resonance, a nod to how stories can trigger emotions and memories. Five writers have been shortlisted in two or more categories, including Clara Chow, the first to be so in the program’s history.
The program also includes a readers’ favorite category, which this year saw more than 4,000 votes cast. Those voters will receive book-purchase vouchers worth 50 Singapore dollars (US$35). Two of the four winners in this round were shortlisted works of fiction, while the other two were nonfiction. The full list of winners is available here.
Winners of the Readers’ Choice category are Ali bin Salim, Daryl Qilin Yam and Pan Zheng Lei for their novels. Their works were among those that received the highest number of consumer votes in each language. The final winner in each language will be announced at the awards ceremony on June 19.
A solar-powered dryer, a soil carbon marketplace and groups that make electric car batteries cleaner, restore Andean forests and deter illegal fishing have been named this year’s Earthshot Prize finalists. Britain’s Prince William, whose Royal Foundation charity launched the 10-year award program in 2020, said that the solutions of all 15 finalists showed “that hope does remain” as the world grapples with climate change.
The prestigious prize was created in 1992 and has awarded nearly $4 million to authors, filmmakers and artists since its inception. It is one of the most coveted in the Asian literary scene and has a reputation for rewarding originality and creativity. In addition to the top cash prize, winners get a special award certificate and a gold medallion. The citation cites the work as having made an “immeasurable contribution to Singapore’s culture.”
This week, Sonny Liew earned another honor when his comic novel won the best US edition of an international publication at this year’s Eisner awards in New York City. The Singapore-born author is known for his distinctive style and has been hailed as Asia’s answer to Stan Lee.
The prize money was initially donated by a private family and later boosted in 1998 to ensure that there is a minimum prize amount of $200,000. The current premium prize amounts are guaranteed at $2 million. A player has a one-in-eleven chance of winning when they purchase a ticket in any of the Singapore Pools outlets or at the official website. Unlike most lottery games, there are no traditional pre-printed tickets for TOTO and players must use their own computers to print them. The game was revamped in 1997, with the introduction of the Snowball and System Entry features that allow a player’s prize to grow as they buy more tickets. The game also added an additional prize category in 1998.