A maker of solar-powered dryers, a soil carbon marketplace and groups that make electric car batteries cleaner, restore Andean forests and deter illegal fishing were among the winners at Tuesday’s Singapore prize ceremony. At the event, Britain’s Prince William said that the solutions presented by the five green innovators were “the light of optimism that remains in these dark times”.

The NUS Singapore History Prize went to Professor Miksic, who is with the university’s Department of Southeast Asian Studies, for his book, Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300 – 1800. Prof Miksic, 61, spent more than 15 years digging up ancient artefacts around Singapore and Southeast Asia to produce the book. He says he wrote it to tell some of the 1,000 volunteers who have helped him with his excavations about the importance of their work.

Other winning publications include Reviving Qixi: Singapore’s Forgotten Seven Sisters Festival by Lynn Wong Yuqing and Lee Kok Leong, and Theatres of Memory: Industrial Heritage in 20th Century Singapore by Loh Kah Seng, Alex Tan Tiong Hee, Koh Keng Wee and Juria Toramae. The Jury Panel commended these two works for their “compelling and riveting accounts of the under-explored themes of cultural and economic heritage in Singapore”.

NTU lecturers and alumni were prominently represented in the prizes handed out by the Singapore Book Council. The English literature prize for fiction was won by Prasanthi Ram, a lecturer at the NTU Language and Communication Centre and PhD alumnus, for her short story cycle Nine Yard Sarees (2023). She beat 91-year-old National University of Singapore Professor Emeritus Peter Ellinger, who won the best English debut prize for Down Memory Lane: Peter Ellinger’s Memoirs.

Other prizes included the prestigious Defence Technology Prize (DTP) for innovations that contribute to Singapore’s defence capabilities, and the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize for water innovation, which went to a team from the Singapore University of Technology who developed an algorithm for wastewater-based COVID-19 epidemiology, which was used by NEA’s Environmental Health Institute, national water agency PUB and Home Team Science and Technology Agency (HTX) as an early warning system during the pandemic. It tightened connections between the water and health sectors, and also served as a tool to monitor localisation of the virus.