SINGAPORE – A community project in a rural village and a book on a local heritage building are among the shortlisted works for this year’s singapore prize. The National University of Singapore history prize is looking for work that “challenges the idea that history only records the lives and times of big movers and shakers.”
Designed by Dutch architects Ben van Berkel and UN Studio, Kampung Admiralty in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan is one such project on the shortlist. The stacked apartment complex was built with an aim to create a sense of belonging for its residents and the wider community, according to organisers. It’s the second time a community or public architecture project has won the prize, after an earthquake-reconstruction project in a village in China’s Yunnan province won in 2016.
Non-fiction work with a personal slant also features on the shortlist, including historian John Miksic’s Seven Hundred Years: A History Of Singapore (2019, available here) and Kamaladevi Aravindan’s Sembawang (2020, available here), which details life at an estate over several decades. There’s also the National Institute of Education senior lecturer Anitha Devi Pillai’s novel Home Is Where We Are, which follows a family’s journey through leftist political movements and detentions in Singapore and Malaysia.
The winner will be announced at a ceremony in November and will receive PS1 million to help scale their environmental projects. They will join a global network of innovators, entrepreneurs and leaders committed to fixing the planet’s climate change problems. The awards ceremony will be held in Singapore for the first time this year, in what organisers say will be the centre of a new Earthshot Week that will see global leaders, businesses and investors gather here to explore opportunities to speed up solutions to reviving our oceans and protecting and restoring nature.
In the non-fiction category, Timothy C. Jessup et al’s paper on ‘Why estimates of peat burned in Indonesia and Kalimantan are so unreliable and why it matters’ has made the shortlist. It’s up against Cyril Wong’s This Side Of Heaven, Daryl Qilin Yam’s Shantih Shantih Shantih and Mallika Naguran’s She Never Looks Quite Back.
A total of more than 4,000 people cast their votes for this year’s prize. They included students and residents of the nation-state, as well as a host of journalists, designers, researchers and cultural critics from around the world. Read the full list of nominees here. Voters could win book-purchase vouchers worth up to US$50 by submitting their favourite choices. The results will be published in a special issue of the magazine later this month. The winners will be named on August 25. The prize was established in 2014 and is backed by a S$350,000 endowment from the National University of Singapore’s Office of the Vice President. It is the only literary prize in Asia that rewards the best writing on Singapore’s past, present and future. It is an official Singapore Prize partner and is endorsed by the country’s Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sports.