A team of 20 dragon boat athletes, led by Britain’s Prince William, took to the waters in Singapore on Monday morning for some vigorous paddling ahead of a ceremony to announce this year’s Earthshot Prize winners. The award, presented in partnership with Temasek and GenZero, promotes solutions to the planet’s environmental threats.

The winning companies were announced at a star-studded awards ceremony at Mediacorp Theatre in Singapore on Tuesday. The event was hosted by Emmy award winner Hannah Waddingham and featured performances from the likes of Bastille, OneRepublic, and Bebe Rexha.

The inaugural Singapore Prize was launched in 2014 to celebrate the nation’s 50th anniversary of independence. It is an annual book award that honours publications that make a lasting impact on Singaporeans’ understanding of the nation’s history. Administered by the National University of Singapore (NUS) Department of History, it carries a cash prize of S$50,000. The first winner was NUS Asia Research Institute distinguished fellow and historian John Miksic’s book Singapore and the Silk Road of the Sea, 1300-1800. The prize was mooted by NUS professor and former Straits Times columnist Kishore Mahbubani in an opinion piece in April 2014. “As Benedict Anderson argued, nations are held together by a shared imagination, and this is crucially anchored in the past,” he said then.

Prof Miksic’s book, published by NUS Press with the National Museum of Singapore, traces the city’s origins from its early days as a trading port to today. It draws on ancient texts and archaeological finds to reveal how the city developed, including a possible naming origin from the Chinese merchant Wang Dayuan’s mention of places that scholars later identified as Singapore.

Mahbubani, who chaired the panel that decided on this year’s winner, added that there may be plans to expand the type of works that can qualify for the prize. He used the example of the movie 12 Years a Slave to suggest that sometimes history can be told better through fiction, movies or other mediums.

The NUS Singapore Prize is open to non-fiction, fiction, and poetry books written in English by a Singaporean author. Comics and graphic novels, as well as translations of literature into English, are also eligible for the award. The work must be the author’s first solo publication in English, and the writer must either be a citizen or permanent resident of Singapore. The work must have been published in the past two years from 2022 to 2023, and be available for purchase in bookstores. Winners will receive a trophy and S$30,000 in cash. The top five shortlisted entries will also be exhibited at the 2023 World of Interiors trade show in Shanghai. The finalists will also be honoured at an awards ceremony in 2023. All shortlisted works are available for sale in major bookstores in Singapore. All finalists will be notified by email on the date of the announcement. The final results will be published on the NUS website and in The Straits Times on 26 February.