The Singapore Prize honours exceptional individuals who have made outstanding contributions to Singaporean society. Held annually since 1995 and named after its founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, this prestigious award seeks to recognize various aspects of its spirit – equality, diversity and religious harmony, meritocracy, pragmatism resilience community service innovation artistic endeavour – including equal access for all and meritocracy, meritocracy pragmatism pragmatic resilience innovation artistic endeavour as well as artistic endeavour.

This year marks a new addition to the prize: Dr Alan HJ Chan “Spirit of Singapore” Book Prize was established through a donation from philanthropist. The prize, presented by SUSS, honours fiction or non-fiction works that embody Singaporean spirit by instilling compassion, empathy and voluntarism into readers.

Last night at state-owned Media Corp, this year’s winners of Singapore Prize were honored for their efforts in addressing societal challenges. Irving Tan of Western Digital Corporation was recognized with Outstanding Overseas Executive of the Year honors due to his track record in driving operational excellence and globalizing operations of their hard disk drive company business; Carro co-founder Aaron Tan was awarded Young Business Leader of the Year due to his vision of building technology into automotive markets in Singapore.

Singapore was honored with the inaugural UNESCO Creative Cities Award, won by a Dutch academic who started testing wastewater samples for Covid-19 virus as early as 2020. The prize has been described as the world’s first award to recognize sustainable holistic urban transformation; its namesake was Lee Kuan Yew who played an essential part in making Singapore into an attractive, liveable global hub.

This year’s prize saw its prize money double and a new category: Arts and Multimedia Category will recognize works that engage deeply with Singapore history non-book formats outside of books that will alternate every three years over six-year cycle with existing Book Category. According to prize Founder and Chair Kishore Mahbubani, these new categories allow more people to appreciate Singapore’s rich heritage through different mediums.

This year’s prize has been bestowed upon 12 works from writers in Singapore’s four official languages – Chinese, English, Malay and Tamil. Entries celebrate Singapore at 60 by depicting its diverse landscapes and quiet beauty, along with complex themes like identity, memory and loss.

This year’s winners also shared an affinity with the prize’s charitable mission. Accordingly, each winning artwork will be auctioned online to benefit The Business Times Budding Artists Fund which supports arts education for underserved young people in Singapore. Furthermore, the Singapore Youth Prize winner will also be presented with a cheque of S$50,000 to further their arts education – more information is available via its contest’s website (this contest runs until Oct 30) while their works will be showcased from Oct 8-30th at Millenia Walk from Oct 8-30 for three weeks before being auctioned online and all proceeds going directly towards charity!