He defeated his friend and the now famous novelist, (late) Thakazhy Shivashankarappilla in the election.
Born in the village of Thakazhy, in Kuttanad, Alappuzha district of Kerala, he started to write stories when he was a schoolboy.
Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai | Changampuzha Krishna Pillai | V. Surendran Pillai | Pillai | Pattom A. Thanu Pillai | Palani Subramaniam Pillai | N. R. Pillai | Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai | S. Ramachandran Pillai | Rajan Pillai | P. Govinda Pillai | Dakshinamurthy Pillai | C. V. Raman Pillai | C. Muthiah Pillai |
Notable personalities like E.M.S and Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai admitted later that they failed to fully understand Kesari's writing on History when he was alive and acknowledged that they could understand it only decades later.
Its early contributors included prominent personalities in Malayalam literature such as MT Vasudevan Nair, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, N. P. Mohammed, C. Radhakrishnan and artists such as BM Gafoor, Yesudasan, Paul Kallanode and Venu.
This include Takali Sivasankara Pilla's Footsteps (1964), Uttupulakkal Velukkutti Vijayan's The Legends of Khasak (1968) and M Mukundan's On the Banks of the River Mahé (1974).