The winner and finalists will have the opportunity to stay at the iconic Raffles Hotel Singapore, enjoy the classic Singapore Sling, and soak in the historic charm of the city. They will also receive a limited-edition artwork print depicting the 2025 race, a unique keepsake from their special weekend experience at one of Formula 1’s most exciting races.

The Prize was established in 2014 in support of the national SG50 programme to mark the country’s 50th anniversary of independence. It is awarded to an outstanding publication that has made a lasting impact on our understanding of Singapore’s history. This year, the award had three new categories including best English debut, best English graphic novel and best English translation.

Two NUS academics were among the finalists for the Singapore Prize this year. Associate Professor Ee Yuen-Long and Dr Si Min Li were nominated for their books – The Future of Chinese Culture (Singapore University Press, 2020) and Remaking Singapore: Modernity, Tradition and Identity (Stanford University Press, 2017). Both works explore how the development of China has shaped Singapore’s modern cultural identity and society.

A third NUS academic, lecturer Yong Shu Hoong, was a finalist for his poetry collection Anatomy of a Wave (Dakota Books, 2018). The book is the two-time recipient of the Singapore Literature Prize in English Poetry and he is also the author of Frottage (2005) and The Viewing Party (2013).

NUS Asia Research Institute distinguished fellow Kishore Mahbubani, who mooted the Prize in a Straits Times column, said: “The famous American social scientist Benedict Anderson once wrote that nations are ‘imagined communities’, and a shared imagination, especially through history, is a critical glue holding societies together today. I am thrilled that the NUS Singapore Prize has been able to contribute to this in a small way.

The prizes were presented at a ceremony at Mediacorp Theatre on Tuesday. The President’s Science and Technology Awards are the highest honours bestowed on scientists and engineers in Singapore.

NUS was the top organisation in the defence category, and won a total of five prizes in the Earthshot Prize, which is funded by Prince William’s royal foundation charity and funds breakthroughs in defence science and technology. It is the second time that NUS has won the accolade in the space of a week.

NUS’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Singapore team won the Visual Localisation Challenge and the Trusted Media Challenge, both part of the Prize Challenge series, in which we invite the AI community to develop multimodal, multilingual, zero-shot models that can detect audiovisual fake media. More details about the competition can be found here.