The Singapore prize was founded in 2014, and was mooted by Kishore Mahbubani — a Distinguished Fellow at the NUS Asia Research Institute and the chairman of this year’s jury panel. It was created in support of SG50 and is designed to encourage an engagement with Singapore history, broadly understood to include pre-1819 history as well as works that consider the country’s place in the world.
The winner of this year’s prize was the book Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800 by archaeologist John Miksic. The idea for the prize stemmed from an opinion column that Mahbubani wrote in April 2014, jokingly asking Singapore’s philanthropists to donate money for a cash award given to “the best history book written on Singapore”. A new Singapore citizen responded soon after with an offer of S$500,000 to set up an endowment fund to be used to support the prize.
In his introduction to the judges’ comments, Mahbubani noted that the winner will have “shown us a part of our nation’s past that we may not know or have forgotten”. He added: “The famous American social scientist, Benedict Anderson, said that nations are ‘imagined communities’, and a shared imagination, particularly in history, is a critical glue holding societies together.”
This year, the prize was augmented by a new category called the People’s Choice award, which was open only to voters who had seen the shortlisted films at the festival. A total of 42 esteemed local and international judges were tasked with reviewing the entries for this category, which was split into English, Malay, and Chinese sections. The judges included academics, educators, curators, and award-winning literary luminaries.
The shortlisted entries for the prize were Sembawang (Singapore in the Time of War), a novel by Jeremy Tiang that chronicles the life of a family over four decades, from the leftist political movements and detentions of the 1980s to the more recent upheavals in the city-state. The other three titles were State of Emergency, a nonfiction account of Singapore’s most turbulent year, by Foo Hai Fellow in Buddhist Studies and NUS Department of History Associate Professor Ian Gordon; The Last Dragon, by educator Beatrice Chong; and the work of art historian and senior curator Suhaili Osman.
The winners of the other seven categories were announced at a ceremony at the National Museum of Singapore on Monday. For a full list of the winners, click here. The winning entries are also available for purchase on ST’s online book store. Subscribe to our newsletters and follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Telegram to get the latest news.