The inaugural Singapore prize was awarded to archaeologist John Miksic in 2018. He won a cash award of S$50,000 for his book on the history of Kampong Gelam. It was the first publication in Singapore to address the full breadth of its history.
The prize was set up in 2014 by former diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, now a professor at NUS. He launched it with the help of an anonymous donor who wanted to remain anonymous.
It is administered by the NUS Department of History. In 2024, a distinguished Jury Panel led by Prof Mahbubani will select the winner of the Prize. The panel will include emeritus professor John Miksic, Chair of the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies; Prof Tan Tai Yong, President of the Singapore University of Social Sciences; Prof Peter A. Coclanis, Director, Global Research Institute, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and economist Dr Lam San Ling.
The NUS Singapore History Prize will celebrate the diversity of Singapore’s past by honouring publications that address any time period, theme or field in Singapore’s history. This includes but is not limited to the fields of social, cultural, economic and political history.
Each year, the prize has a different theme and criteria, with the aim of promoting public interest in Singapore’s rich heritage and fostering greater understanding of our nation’s identity and development. The prize is open to students from all over the world and will feature four categories – the Judges’ Prize, the Public Vote Prize, the School Prize and the Youth Prize.
Each category will be awarded a cash prize of up to S$13,000 and a trophy. Students must be nominated by their teachers. They can submit their artworks online before the submission deadline. The winning student artist will also receive a cash prize of S$3,500 and a 12-month Storytel audiobook gift subscription.
Architects based in Singapore have won the top prize at the World Architecture Festival (WAF) before – the Interlace, a stacked apartment building designed by OMA and German architect Ole Scheeren, and the National Museum of Singapore by Japanese firm SANAA in 2010. The WAF jury is composed of leading architects from around the world. Kampung Admiralty is the third such project to win the award in recent years, joining the post-earthquake reconstruction of a village in China and a public library in Japan’s Yunnan province.
