MUMBAI: BITS Law School, Mumbai, a new-age law school under the aegis of BITS Pilani, an Institution of Eminence, has announced two new awards to mark the 85th birth anniversary of renowned 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. Reflecting BITS Law School’s commitment to the humanities, critical inquiry, and interdisciplinary learning in legal education, the awards also honour De Souza’s legacy as a poet, novelist, editor, and thinker whose work moved fluidly between creative and scholarly forms.
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 B.A. LL.B. or B.B.A. LL.B. 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 Prof. Akhil Katyal, Associate Professor of English Literature at BITS Law School, 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.
“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,” said Prof. (Dr.) Ashish Bharadwaj, Founding Dean, BITS Law School.
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 (Mumbai) 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 & 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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