The winner of today’s Toto draw will walk away with $10 million in cash. This is a significant increase from the group one prize of just over $13 million on Oct 10. There have been no winners in the past three draws.
The prize was established in 2014 in support of the SG50 programmes to mark Singapore’s five decades of independence. It is the first of its kind here devoted to the country’s history and is administered by the National University of Singapore’s Department of History.
Khir Johari’s The Food of the Malay Archipelago, a 3.2kg tome that took 14 years from conception to publication, has clinched this year’s singapore prize in the English-language nonfiction category. The book beat five others in the shortlist to take home the top prize, which comes with a trophy and a cash prize of $50,000.
It is a remarkable win for the tome, which has now won seven laurels in total, including the 2021 prize awarded by Marshall Cavendish. The author, a retired senior lecturer at NUS, was also given the Singapore Book Council’s achievement award, an honor that goes to a writer who has published work in more than two languages.
Other winners included Reviving Qixi: Singapore’s Forgotten Seven Sisters Festival by Lynn Wong Yuqing and Lee Kok Leong, which won the Chinese language non-fiction prize, and Theatres of Memory: Industrial Heritage in 20th Century Singapore by Loh Kah Seng, Alex Tan, Yan Tian Hee, Koh Keng Wee, Tan Teng Phee, and Juria Toramae, who won the English creative non-fiction prize. The judges praised both books for exploring important and understudied topics in Singapore’s history.
The prize has also been hailed for bringing attention to the growing field of scholarship on the region’s histories. It has spurred interest in the subject among younger researchers and students, who have been inspired to follow in the footsteps of previous generations of scholars.
The prize is funded by an anonymous donor and was conceived by former diplomat and columnist Kishore Mahbubani, who chairs the prize’s jury panel. He recalled in an interview this year that the idea came from an opinion piece he wrote in 2014 that urged Singapore’s philanthropists to set up a prize for the best historical books on the country. A few months later, an anonymous donor offered S$500,000 to establish the prize and an endowment fund, and the Singapore Prize was born. The prize celebrates the enduring value of Singapore’s history in the Asian Century, he said. It also aims to strengthen connections between Singaporeans and their fellow historians, both locally and abroad. It is a rare opportunity to see the nation’s intellectual community come together as one. The prize is open to authors from all over the world and will be awarded every three years. This year’s shortlist was announced in June, with four titles in each of the four official languages. It was compiled from 192 submissions, roughly half the number of works that were submitted in 2020. The public can vote online for their favorite in the Readers’ Favorite category, which awards 1,000 Singapore dollars (US$720) to the winning entry in each of the four languages.