Singapore Prize 2024 Winner AnnouncedSingapore Prize 2024 Winner Announced
The singapore prize is an award to recognise and reward Singaporeans for their outstanding published works in Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. The prize is a biennial accolade for fiction and poetry, with two top awards for each of the languages. The prize is a collaboration between the National Book Development Council of Singapore, the Singapore Press Holdings and the National Library Board.
The winner of the 2024 Singapore Prize was Wesley Leon Aroozoo’s The Punkhawala and the Prostitute (Epigram Books, 2021). It was selected by a five-member Jury Panel led by Kishore Mahbubani, Distinguished Fellow at NUS Asia Research Institute, from a shortlist of six books that had been nominated for the Prize. The other members of the jury were Foo Hai Fellow in Buddhist Studies Associate Professor Jack Meng-Tat Chia; emeritus Professor John N Miksic from NUS Department of History; and senior curator Dr Seng Yu Jin.
At the awards ceremony, which took place at Mediacorp Campus, William and Kate heard first-hand about the work of organisations in Singapore that are working to combat illegal wildlife trade, estimated to be worth $20 billion a year. This included the United for Wildlife summit, featuring law enforcement agencies and conservation groups from around the world, as well as companies that are driving the shift to a low carbon economy.
In the evening, the winners of the top prizes were announced. Marylyn Tan became the first female winner of Singapore Prize’s 28-year history, winning the English poetry category for Gaze Back. The judges described her work as “a clarion call for gender and linguistic reclamation, searing in its sassy confidence and universal appetite”.
Also at the event, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam presented the Singapore Book Council achievement award to late Malay author Suratman Markasan’s daughter, Dr Suriani Markasan. He said the honour was “well deserved”.
Ning Cai won the Mandarin poetry category, while Dmytro Udovychenko, Anna Agafia Egholm and Angela Sin Ying Chan won the Malay poetry category and a concert engagement respectively. Each received USD $110,000, which is in addition to the prize money that they had won in their respective categories.
The awards do away with specific entry categories that separate students, professionals and corporates, with submissions open to anyone who uses design as their primary problem-solving tool. The judges, who are drawn from the Singapore business community, were particularly impressed with the dynamism of the entries and the fact that many had been launched in less than five years. The winners will receive a cash prize of S$200,000, and their works will be published in the Singapore Prize anthology. They will also be showcased on the website of the competition.