Singapore Prize Winners Announced
The winners of this year’s singapore prize have been announced at an extravagant ceremony at Mediacorp Theatre. Prince William walked the green carpet alongside host Hannah Waddingham, 49, wearing a sharp dark green velour suit and dickie bow to match the thick green carpet. He then shook hands with the winners and presented their prizes to them.
The awards were handed out by the Singapore Book Publishers Association (SBPA). The SBPA was established in 2012 to recognise and celebrate quality publishing in Singapore. Its awards include literary work, education titles, professional books, children’s books and various categories of non-fiction. It also includes a prestigious Book of the Year title chosen from subsidiary award winners.
A total of 17 writers, translators and comic artists won this year’s Singapore Literature Prize. The biennial award honours published works in Singapore’s four official languages: Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. This year’s competition saw a 30 per cent increase in submissions. It was also the first time that fiction competed with poetry in one category.
This year’s winners include the novelist and poet Ning Cai, whose satirical fable of the ghosts of an imperial court was deemed “the most outstanding” work in the fiction category. The judges praised it for its depictions of the inequalities and absurdities of life, as well as for its ability to capture the angst of the modern urban middle classes.
Other winners include the self-published Cockman (2022), in which a chicken from another dimension finds itself stranded on Earth in human form, which won the inaugural English comic or graphic novel prize. The judges praised the novel for its “total lack of seriousness and compromise”, as well as its “over-the-top audacity and absurdity”.
Among the non-fiction category’s winners was the memoir by former Singapore minister Lee Kuan Yew, titled A Little White Duckling, about his childhood in a rural village in China. The judges commended the author for the courage of his writing and his ability to capture the “astounding rigour and depth” of life in Asia.
A pair of finalists in the architecture category are Kampung Admiralty, a post-earthquake reconstruction project in a rural village in Yunnan province, and the stacked apartments known as the Interlace. Both projects were designed by the Singapore-based firm OMA and German architect Ole Scheeren.
AI Singapore has launched a contest to find the best model that can discern benign from harmful memes, in order to foster safer online interactions worldwide. The 10-week Online Safety Prize Challenge calls for teams to develop multimodal, multilingual and zero-shot models that will be able to understand the diverse and nuanced Singaporean digital landscape.
The winning teams will receive grants worth up to SG$500,000 to further develop their prototypes and test them in a real-world setting. The competition is open to universities and research institutes around the world. For more information, visit the website here.