Singapore Literature Prize trims categories from 18 to 8, raises prize money to $5,000
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Prasanthi Ram receiving her Singapore Literature Prize award from Meira Chand at the ceremony in 2024.
ST PHOTO: ARIFFIN JAMAR
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SINGAPORE – Just two years after introducing new award categories for translations and comic books, the biennial Singapore Literature Prize has suspended these for review.
It has also scratched a new debut author category and combined the fiction and creative non-fiction prizes for a consolidated prose award. The overhaul of the prize effectively halves the number of categories authors can vie for from 18 to eight.
Remaining categories are for prose and poetry in the four official languages of English, Chinese, Malay and Tamil.
The streamlining of the Singapore Literature Prize, billed as the country’s most prestigious, was set out in a statement on April 8 by organiser Singapore Book Council (SBC).
The council also introduced a $20 application fee for each submission, with waivers available on a case-by-case basis.
On a happier note, prize money for each category winner has been increased from $3,000 to $5,000.
It is the first cash increase since Covid-19, when the prize money was dramatically slashed from $10,000 to $3,000.
The council said in a statement: “These changes are part of our effort to ensure that the prize continues to be credible, competitive and sustainable amid rising operational costs and a challenging landscape. While the value of a work has never been pegged to prize money, we recognise the importance of monetary recognition.”
The review of the translation and comics/graphic novels categories are in part due to the difficulty of compiling a competitive pool of entries, “based on observations from the previous edition”.
In the interim, they will not qualify in the prose and fiction categories for the 2026 edition.
In a more limited way, the council said the combined prose category continues to reflect the “increasingly fluid boundaries between forms, encourage experimentation and support writers working across hybrid and cross-genre literary writing”.
Debut works will still find an arena in the main categories as in 2024, when three of the five shortlisted works in the English fiction category were debuts, including Prasanthi Ram’s Nine Yard Sarees: A Short Story Cycle (2023) that eventually took home the night’s grand prize.
SBC executive director William Phuan is confident new writers can hold their own. “Many of the debut writers and works are strong enough to compete in the main categories, and a few of them have won.”
The Singapore Literature Prize was set up in 1992 with just one category for English fiction and a top prize of $10,000. There have been major restructures in the past. Between 2000 and 2004, there was no prize money, with winners receiving a trophy sculpted by artist Iskandar Jalil instead.
In 2004, the annual prize became a biennial affair, and non-fiction and poetry categories were added in 2014. The inclusion in 2024 of the translation, comics/graphic novels and debut categories was the first time in a decade that new categories had been added to acknowledge global publishing and reading trends.
Today, the Singapore Literature Prize’s prize money is dwarfed by others, such as the $30,000 Dr Alan HJ Chan Spirit of Singapore Book Prize presented by the Singapore University of Social Sciences, the $100,000 National University of Singapore History Prize, and the $25,000 Epigram Books Fiction Prize.
But as one of Singapore’s oldest literature prizes, it still carries prestige, and its commitment to placing multilingual works on an equal footing remains unique. The submissions for 2026 will open on April 13, with winners announced in early December.
