The third annual awards ceremony for a global environmental prize founded by Britain’s Prince William will be held in Singapore this November. Known as the Earthshot Prize, it will award PS1 million to five winners to help drive change to repair and regenerate the planet over this decade.
Organisers of the Singapore Prize said that this year, they were looking at how they could expand the range of works that can qualify for the award. They would like to look into including books on the humanities, movies, comics and other formats. Kishore Mahbubani, senior advisor (university and global relations) at NUS, explained that the decision to include more genres was due to the fact that there are certain subjects that cannot be effectively told through text alone. He used the example of the movie 12 Years a Slave to demonstrate how fiction can tell history in ways that text cannot.
Five writers have been shortlisted this year in the prize’s English fiction, English creative non-fiction and Chinese poetry categories. Clara Chow, a writer whose work was picked for all three categories and two languages, is the first person in the program’s history to do so.
A new category called Readers’ Favorite will be introduced this year. The public will be able to vote online for their favorite book from the shortlist in each of the four official languages. The winner in each language will receive 1,000 Singapore dollars (US$720). The prize will also feature a performance by world-renowned artists and musicians, although organizers have not yet announced who will be performing this time around.
The prize, which has a total payout of S$200,000 ($111,000), is supported by philanthropic organisation Temasek Trust and investments firm Temasek Holdings. It aims to honour outstanding published works in Singapore’s Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil languages. Previous winners include novelists Meira Chand and Ning Cai, historian Peter Coclanis and archaeologist John Miksic from NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies.
In a media release, organisers of the prize said that this year’s event will be held in conjunction with a week-long series of events aimed at mobilising and scaling innovative solutions to protect the planet. It will also bring together leaders from government, businesses and investors to discuss the challenges that they face in delivering on their climate change commitments.
The prize, which is named after Singapore’s first Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, is the only national literary prize in the country to honor works in its four official languages. The competition was launched in 1992 and offers 12 top prizes of up to S$10,000 each for fiction, non-fiction and poetry in Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. It is administered by the National Book Development Council of Singapore. The prize has been supported by a grant from the National Arts Council since 2012. The other main funders are the Temasek Trust and the Singapore Press Holdings. The National Library Board is a partner in the programme.