The Singapore Prize is a biennial award for Singaporean books in Chinese, English and Malay that are published in any language. The book competition is a joint initiative of the National Book Development Council of Singapore and the National Arts Council. The winning books compete for top prizes of up to $10,000 each. The prize was established in 2014, and is supported by a philanthropic endowment gifted by Temasek. The prize is administered by Conservation International (CI), which brings its long history of spotlighting nature and securing the benefits for humanity to the selection process.
The prize’s jury, chaired by NUS Asia Research Institute distinguished fellow Kishore Mahbubani, nominated 31 books from publishers for consideration. It decided on the inaugural winner this year – Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800 by archaeologist John Miksic. The idea for the prize came from a Straits Times opinion column Mahbubani wrote in April 2014. He asked Singaporeans to donate money to set up a cash prize for the best book on Singapore’s history, saying that a shared imagination, especially through history, is the glue that holds societies together.
Miksic’s book earned the gong because it “lays the foundations for a fundamental reinterpretation of Singapore’s place in the larger Asian context.” It also fills gaps in our understanding of the early city-state, including references in literary records of trade routes that may have referred to Singapore.
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