BITS Law School announces awards in memory of writer Eunice De Souza

BITS Law School, Mumbai, under the aegis of BITS Pilani, has announced two new awards to mark the 85th birth anniversary of writer Eunice De Souza (1940–2017).

Instituted in her memory, the Annual Eunice De Souza Memorial Gold Medal and the Annual Eunice De Souza Memorial Award will recognise excellence in writing, within and beyond the classroom.

The Annual Eunice De Souza Memorial Gold Medal will be awarded at the Convocation each year to an outgoing student who has performed well in English Literature courses during the BA LLB or BBA LLB programme and has shown strong potential in academic or creative writing.

The Annual Eunice De Souza Memorial Award, instituted by the BITSLAW Writing Centre (BWC), led by Associate Professor of English Literature at BITS Law School, Prof Akhil Katyal, will recognise a prominent author whose work spans creative and scholarly writing and addresses legal, social, political, cultural or aesthetic themes. The awardee will be invited to deliver a public lecture at the BITS Law School campus.

These awards aim to honour Eunice De Souza’s legacy as a poet, novelist, editor, and thinker whose work moved fluidly between creative and scholarly forms.

Commenting on the development, Prof (Dr) Ashish Bharadwaj, Founding Dean, BITS Law School, said,

“Eunice De Souza’s work reminds us that the way we write, read, and think shapes how we engage with justice. By instituting these two awards, we hope to build a tradition that values language, literature, and lived experience as essential to shaping the legal imagination. Legal education is not just a technical pursuit; it is also a humanistic one, and these awards reflect that belief."

Eunice de Souza (1940 – 2017) was an award-winning and critically lauded poet, novelist, literary critic and editor, scholar and journalist based in Mumbai, where she headed the Department of English at St. Xavier’s College for several years. She was born into a Goan family settled in Pune. After her initial schooling, de Souza attended Sophia College in Mumbai and subsequently earned a master's degree in English literature from Marquette University, Wisconsin, and her PhD from the University of Mumbai.

She started teaching at St. Xavier’s College in 1969, where she headed the Department of English for several years.

In a career spanning four decades, de Souza published five collections of poetry and a couple of novels, compiled anthologies of Indian women’s writing, edited volumes of folk tales and poems for children, and contributed review articles on art, literature and culture for a weekly column to the Mumbai Mirror. She was also actively involved in organizing stage plays for the annual theatre festival “Ithaka” hosted by St. Xavier’s College.

Her publications include path-breaking volumes of poetry such as Fix (Newground, 1979), Women in Dutch Painting (Praxis, 1988), Ways of Belonging (Polygon, 1990) and A Necklace of Skulls (Penguin, 2009), novels such as Dangerlok (Penguin, 2001) and Dev & Simran: A Novel (Penguin, 2003), salient Literary and Critical Anthologies and Edited Volumes such as Statements: An Anthology of Indian Prose in English (Orient Longman, 1976), Talking Poems: Conversations with Poets (Oxford UP, 1999), Nine Indian Women Poets: An Anthology (Oxford UP, 2001), Women’s Voices: Selections from Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Indian Writing in English (Oxford UP, 2004), Purdah: An Anthology (Oxford UP, 2004), 101 Folktales from India (Penguin, 2004) and These My Words: The Penguin Book of Indian Poetry (Penguin, 2012). 

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