The PGA Championship and the NUS Singapore Prize

The PGA Championship is on the horizon, but there’s plenty going on right now for players and fans alike. The tournament heads to Singapore next week, where we’ll find out if defending champion Brooks Koepka can defend his title.

It’s not every day that you get to see a royal visit in action, but that’s exactly what happened at the weekend when Prince William made his first trip to Asia since becoming king. The British monarch attended the Earthshot Prize awards ceremony in Singapore, which aims to find solutions to climate change before it’s too late.

This year’s winners include solar-powered dryers that combat food waste and a system to make electric car batteries cleaner. At the event, which was held at Mediacorp Campus, the prince praised the work of the five winners, noting that “hope remains as long as we continue to seek the answers we need.”

This is the first time the ceremony has been held in Asia, and it marked the third edition of the prize, named after President John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” speech in 1962, which challenged Americans to reach the moon by the end of that decade. The prizes are awarded by the NUS Asia Research Institute, which is headed by distinguished fellow Kishore Mahbubani. Celebrities including Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, actors Donnie Yen and Lana Condor and Australian wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin also attended the ceremony, which was the first to feature celebrity presenters.

NUS Singapore History Prize

The Department of History at NUS has shortlisted six compelling works for this inaugural award, aimed at celebrating the rich and diverse history of the city-state. The shortlist features a mix of works with a broad slant and those with a more personal slant, ranging from the historical to the memoir. The winner will receive a cash award of S$50,000.

One such book is Nine Yard Sarees (2019, available here), a cycle of stories by Kamaladevi Chatterjee that follows Tamil migrants in Singapore. Each story tells a different tale of a woman who carries a complex inner life as she navigates the ill-defined space between societies that migrants tend to inhabit.

Other works in the running are Jeremy Tiang’s Sembawang, which follows the lives of members of a leftist political movement and detention camp during the Cold War, and Leluhur: Singapore’s Kampong Gelam (2019, available here), by Hidayah Amin, who explores the history of a heritage royal building that’s now known as Gedung Kuning. Both authors have written about their subject in an accessible way, and show how accomplishment means more than just having the right job or amount of money in your bank account.