Born to a bhatkar, or landowning family, Epitácio Pais was a primary school teacher by profession. He attended liceu, or high school, in Portuguese before undergoing his teacher training. He contributed short stories in Portuguese to newspapers such as Diário de Goa and O Heraldo from the 1950s to the 1980s. He also participated in the Portuguese-language programme Renascença, which ran on All-India Radio until the 1980s. For José Pereira, Pais was "one of Goa’s prominent writers of fiction in Portuguese". For Manuel de Seabra and Vimala Devi, Pais was a writer who felt the world around him in all his poetry and tragedy and whose writing was reminiscent of Russian writers like Turgenev and Korolenko.