The 2022 biennial Singapore Literature Prize honoured 12 winners across the island nation’s four languages in a ceremony at the Victoria Theatre. The English comic or graphic novel category was won by the self-published Cockman (2022), a story of a chicken from another dimension stranded on Earth in human form. The work was lauded for its “total lack of seriousness and compromise” and its over-the-top audacity. The award for non-fiction went to the NUS Singapore History Prize, which was launched in 2014 to spur interest in Singapore’s past. The tome Khir Johari’s The Food of the Singapore Malays: Gastronomic Travels Through the Archipelago took 14 years from conception to publication and weighs 3.2kg. It beat five other shortlisted books in the competition and will receive a cash prize of $50,000.
The inaugural Singapore History Prize was won by archaeologist John Miksic’s book Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800. The work revealed how fragmented historical records such as literary references to Temasek pointed towards the existence of the city-state long before Sir Stamford Raffles landed there in 1819.
Another winner in the non-fiction category was Shelly Bryant, who divides her time between Shanghai and Singapore. She is a poet, novelist and translator. She has translated works from Chinese to English for Penguin, Epigram, HSRC and Giramondo Books and edited poetry anthologies with Ilya Kaminsky. She was a finalist for the Man Asian Literary Prize in 2012.
The NUS prize, administered by the Department of History, will reward non-fiction works that make Singapore’s complexities and nuances more accessible to a wider audience. The S$500,000 (US$250,000) prize was sparked by an opinion column that Prof Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, wrote in April 2014. He appealed for philanthropists to donate money for a Singapore history book prize, and a new Singapore citizen responded three months later with a $500,000 donation that would be placed into an endowment fund.
At a media briefing yesterday, NUS explained that the competition will be open from January and book-length non-fiction works that touch on any aspect of Singapore’s history are eligible. NUS said it will be a competitive and merit-based prize with the winner determined by a four-member jury panel, which will include Mahbubani.
The ceremony also saw a presentation of the Harvard Prize Book to pre-tertiary students who have shown “unwavering care” for others in the community. One recipient, Muhammad Dinie from ITE College Central, shared his experiences on how he helped to lead a project during the Covid-19 pandemic to bring meals and groceries to Town Council cleaners in the Ang Mo Kio estate. He received the award on behalf of his fellow students. President Tharman Shanmugaratnam was the guest-of-honour at the event. The late Malay writer Suratman Markasan, who died in February, was awarded the Singapore Book Council achievement award. The award was presented by his daughter. A grove of trees will be planted in his honour at the Rain Vortex indoor waterfall in Changi Airport.