Taking inspiration from President Kennedy’s 1962 challenge to land on the moon, Britain’s Prince William returned to Singapore this week for the third awards ceremony of his Earthshot Prize, which celebrates innovative solutions to nature protection, clean air, ocean revival and waste elimination. At the first ceremony held in Asia, a star-studded crowd including actors Donnie Yen, Lana Condor and Nomzano Mbatha as well as Australian wildlife conservationist Robert Irwin joined the prince to unveil five winners whose inventions range from solar-powered dryers to combating food waste to making electric car batteries cleaner.
The top prize in each category carries $3,000 and a commissioned trophy, plus a 12-month gift code for StoryTel audiobooks. Almost half of this year’s shortlisted titles were written for the first time, with two winning both the consumer choice and the writers’ favorite categories (rmaa cureess by Rama Suresh in Tamil and Daryl Qilin Yam’s speculative short story collection Lion City in English). Two Epigram Books titles shared the winner of the Chinese fiction prize: SG50-centric novel Kian Kok by Chia Joo Ming and Wong Koi Tet’s rhapsody in poems Dakota Crescent.
91-year-old National University of Singapore professor emeritus Peter Ellinger won the best English debut prize for Down Memory Lane, his memoirs that recounts a life intersecting with many historical events. The prize judges called the work “a monumental undertaking,” adding that it “recalls and engages the past, bringing to life a multifaceted and complex narrative with beautiful cohesion.”
The runner-up in the same category was poet Aedann See’s question about how science might replicate the unique mechanism some bats use to resist cancer. The judge said the question was “brilliant and a clarion call for gender and linguistic reclamation, searing in its sassy confidence and universal appetite.”
As many of the prizes in the singapore prize are eye-catching — such as handphones or audio system models — it is possible they can be “detrimental to an individual’s economic judgment,” according to Dr Lui Yit Shiang, a senior consultant psychiatrist at Otium Mindhealth. High-value prizes, he said, can entice people to risk more than they can afford to lose, and that could be especially damaging to minors or those with lower financial literacy.
The singapore prize ceremony was streamed live on the organiser’s Facebook and YouTube pages. At Paco Funworld at Bugis+, most patrons CNA approached did not know about the prize cap, which aims to discourage addictive gambling behavior. But some, like Cindy Chia, who visits the arcade once a month with her children, were not bothered. “We are not really interested in the prizes,” she said. “We just come here for the rides.” She added that she did not even notice the banners announcing the new limit when she entered the arcade on Tuesday.