Singapore Prize 2018 Winners and Finalists Announced

The Singapore prize is a biennial award for English, Mandarin or Tamil writing on Singapore’s history and culture. The prize is administered by the NUS Department of History and was launched in 2014 to spur interest in Singapore’s history, make the complexities and nuances of the island’s past more accessible to non-academic audiences, and foster discussions on Singapore’s place in the world.

This year, a total of 26 submissions were shortlisted by the panel of judges, which included Esplanade communications and content head Clarissa Oon for English creative non-fiction, Cultural Medallion recipient KTM Iqbal for Malay poetry and Dr Sa’eda Buang of the Asian Languages and Cultures Academic Group for Malay fiction. The judges’ quality led them to issue, for the first time, two special commendations without attendant cash awards: Reviving Qixi: Singapore’s Forgotten Seven Sisters Festival by Lynn Wong and Lee Kok Leong was named as the inaugural winner; Theatres Of Memory: Industrial Heritage Of 20th Century Singapore by Loh Kah Seng, Alex Tan, Koh Keng We, Tan Teng Phee and Juria Toramae came in second runner-up.

Professor Miksic said that he was delighted to win the Singapore Prize in 2018, which he described as “an acknowledgement that you don’t need to be a historian to write a history book or story about our nation”. He praised Ms Hidayah Amin, the 2021 Singapore Prize winner for her work Leluhur: Singapore Kampong Gelam, saying it is both a synthesis and a primary source as well as an affirmation of ordinary people who have stories to tell.

Ms Hidayah Amin agreed that her book, which traces the rich history of a neighbourhood in the heart of the city, is an important addition to Singapore’s literature. She added: “I hope that it will encourage other people to share their own histories. We have such an interesting and diverse history, so there’s no shortage of subjects to explore.”

The winners and finalists of this year’s Singapore prize will travel to New York for the third annual Earthshot Week from 6 November to 9 November, where they will meet with global leaders in business, government and science to accelerate their solutions that can help repair our planet. For more information, click here. The event is made possible by the generous support of donors and partners including Accenture, Investec, and the UN Foundation.