The Singapore prize is a biennial award for the best published works of fiction or non-fiction in English, Chinese and Malay. The prize is organised by the National Book Development Council of Singapore. The inaugural prize was awarded in 2024.
The prize has a total of 12 top prizes, including the premium prize worth a minimum of $99,000. This year, the prize has done away with specific entry categories that separate students, professionals and corporates to welcome all creative persons who use design as their primary problem-solving tool. This year also sees the introduction of a special honour for writers, as well as more support and recognition for organisations that help authors in their career progression.
Its founder, Dr Kishore Mahbubani, says it was a natural step to add a literary prize because Singapore is “a country of the book”. “The Nobel laureate physicist Stephen Hawking once said that ‘nations are forged in the imaginations of their people’. The same could be said for societies, which is why a culture of reading and writing is so important,” he adds.
Mahbubani is also the director of the NUS Asia Research Institute and the founder of The Straits Times’ literary section, which was launched in 1992. He was the first editor-in-chief of The Straits Times, which he led from 1996 to 2009. The Singapore Literature Prize is named after him in honour of his contribution to publishing in Singapore and in Southeast Asia.
A winner of the prize in the past, he has written extensively about Singapore’s history and culture. He was a founding member and former chairman of the Singapore Book Publishers Association, a founding director of The Arts House and former president of the Writers Guild of Singapore.
He is a fellow of the Singapore Academy of Social Sciences and was made a life peer in the House of Lords in 2008.
This year’s shortlisted books include historical tome Seven Hundred Years Of Singapore (2019, available here) by Kwa Chong Guan, Tan Tai Yong, Peter Borschberg and Derek Heng; Kamaladevi Aravindan’s novel Sembawang (1920s-2020s), which details life at an estate; and Lynn Wong Yuqing & Lee Kok Leong’s Theatres Of Memory: Industrial Heritage In 20th Century Singapore (2019, available here). The winning work will be announced on June 14. NUS will manage the donation of $5 million that will be matched dollar for dollar by the government to create an endowment fund for the prize.