As one of the world’s leading centres for innovation and entrepreneurship, Singapore is the perfect location to host The Earthshot Prize 2023, a global award that recognises people who are developing solutions to address the most pressing environmental problems. The winner of the prize, which will be awarded in November, will receive a grant of £1.2 million to help scale their innovative ideas and impact more people.
The awards ceremony was held at the Theatre Mediacorp in Singapore. Prince William donned a dark green suit for the event and was joined by hosts Hannah Waddingham and Sterling K Brown, who both wore suits with ties that matched the green carpet. Celebrities such as Donnie Yen, Nomzamo Mbatha and Lana Condor also attended the glitzy ceremony.
During the awards ceremony, the prince announced the winners for his new competition. He presented the five winning projects, which include an algorithm that will predict the risk of wildfires in California, a machine that can analyse sewage water to identify harmful bacteria and a device that can track the location of migrant boats. The prince commended the winners for their “vision and commitment to creating a safer, more sustainable and healthier world.”
He added that “the most important thing we can do is to bring together as many different people as possible to make a real difference.”
Another of the prizes handed out was the NUS Singapore History Prize. The prize was established in 2014 when NUS Professor Rajasekhar Mahbubani wrote an opinion column calling for philanthropists to donate money to finance a book on Singapore’s history. An anonymous donor responded to the call and offered to fund the prize with an endowment.
This year, the winner for the Singapore history prize was Prof Miksic’s book, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800. The citation for the book describes it as an excellent example of both synthesis and primary sources, with the author drawing on her personal inputs. Prof Miksic remarked that the prize is “an indication to the general public that they don’t have to be historians to write a history book.”
Other winners included the graph data platform Neo4j, which won the top technology award in the category of Most Innovative Graph Data Platform 2022, and the online fashion brand Stylehaul. In the readers’ choice awards, the shortlisted writers were alllkunila (Azhagunila), innnpaa and Jee Leong Koh in English creative nonfiction; and the Tamil authors rma cureess and Daryl Lim Wei Jie in English fiction.
A total of 4,000 readers voted in this round of consumer choice, double the number from 2020. The three shortlisted nonfiction books—Ali Bin Salim, Pan Zheng Lei and rma cureess by Rama Suresh—are now in the running to be Singapore’s next book of the year. More details about the winners can be found here.