Mumbai’s BITS Law School, has announced two new awards to mark the 85th birth anniversary of renowned writer Eunice De Souza. The gold medal and memorial award will honour excellence in writing and celebrate De Souza’s literary and scholarly legacy.
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.
BITS Law School, running under the aegis of BITS Pilani, constituted the annual ‘Eunice De Souza memorial gold medal’ and the annual ‘Eunice De Souza memorial award’ to recognise excellence in writing, within and beyond the classroom. According to the institution, the law school aims to honour the legacy of De Souza 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 performs well in English literature courses during the B.A. LL.B. or B.B.A. LL.B. programme, and shows strong potential in academic or creative writing. Similarly, the annual ‘Eunice De Souza memorial award’, instituted by the BITSLAW Writing Centre (BWC), will recognise a prominent author whose work spans creative and scholarly writing and addresses legal, social, political, cultural or aesthetic themes.
A Humanistic Vision for Legal Education
Dr. Ashish Bharadwaj, founding dean of 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.”
A Multifaceted Literary Career
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. Her publications include path-breaking volumes of poetry such as ‘Fix’, ‘Women in Dutch Painting’, ‘Ways of Belonging and A Necklace of Skulls’, novels such as ‘Dangerlok’ and ‘Dev & Simran: A Novel’.
