Amid the backdrop of a booming start-up scene and rapidly rising carbon emissions, Singapore has emerged as a hub for innovations that aim to mitigate climate change. In line with this, the Earthshot Prize has come to town in 2023 for a week of celebration and impact. The award, which was launched by GenZero and the Temasek Foundation in partnership with GRST, is a recognition of pioneering projects and initiatives that are driving progress towards a sustainable future.
Among the 2024 winners, the biggest accolade went to Khir Johari for The Food of the Malay Archipelago (Singapore: Epigram Books, 2022). Johari’s exhaustive tome – which took 14 years from conception to completion and weighs an impressive 3.2kg – won the NUS Singapore History Prize, beating five other shortlisted works to scoop the $50,000 top prize. It beat out non-fiction works with a strong historical slant such as Kwa Chong Guan’s Seven Hundred Years: A History Of Singapore and Yong Siew Tung’s The People Behind The Flag, as well as fiction that focuses on the lives of average Singaporeans like Kamaladevi Aravindan’s Sembawang.
Other winners included Thai director Thaweechok Phasom for her acclaimed film Spirits of the Black Leaves, which won Best Southeast Asian Short Film, and Vietnamese cinematographer Dam Quang Trung for his work Elephants by the Roadside, which garnered the award for Best Cinematography. Singaporean animation filmmaker Calleen Koh also won the Best Singapore Short Film. The inaugural Dr Alan HJ Chan Spirit of Singapore Book Prize, meanwhile, awarded $30,000 to the writer of a book that “champions mindsets and values important to the shaping of Singapore” – with equality, diversity, religious harmony, meritocracy, pragmatism and resilience listed as some of the criteria.
The award was inaugurated in April with a $1 million donation by Confucian scholar Alan Chan. Besides rewarding local authors, the prize also seeks to promote the reading of such books in schools.
A total of 12 top prizes were offered for this year’s competition, including one for each of the four official languages of Singapore: Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. In a change from the previous format, where fiction competed with poetry for one prize each, this year’s awards saw the launch of three new categories: best debut novel, best English graphic novel and best translation.
The final prize winners were announced at a ceremony held on 7 November. Aside from the top awards, consumers could also vote for their favorite books in a consumer choice category. The four winners – Ali bin Salim, Daryl Qilin Yam, Pan Zheng Lei and rma cureess – received cash and book-purchase vouchers worth up to S$1,000 each. You can find the full list of winners here.