Janeita Singh wins the 2025 Oxford Bookstore Art Book Prize for ‘FN Souza: The Archetypal Artist’

FN Souza: The Archetypal Artist by academic and art critic Janeita Singh is the winner of the 2025 Oxford Bookstore Art Book Prize. She was awarded a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh.

The book, published by Niyogi Books, offers an analysis of the paintings created by the modern Indian painter FN Souza and his life. This collection of 21 essays combining research in art history, Eastern–Western philosophy, classical literature, Jungian analysis, psychology, anthropology, religion and theatre began as a personal quest by the author to seek answers to cultural constructs of life, body and sexuality.

With her interest in interdisciplinary research, Singh endeavours to morph inquiry into a webbed storytelling format to reach the general and inquisitive reader. This illustrated monograph is her debut nonfiction book based on a 12-year research project, begun in 2012.

Instituted in 2022, the Oxford Bookstore Art Book Prize is an innovative collaboration between Oxford Bookstores and the Visual Arts Gallery, celebrating the best in art publications published in the English language. The Prize is an open invitation for publishers, academics who research art and culture, collectives and independent artists based in India who are involved from the conceptualisation stage through the production stage of various...

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