K. Ayyappa Paniker—poet, translator, critic, editor, and academic—was a pioneering practitioner and interpreter of the modernist impulse in Malayalam literature. His poetry in Malayalam has been collected in five chronologically organized volumes, and his collected essays run into three volumes. Besides these, he published several collections of translations of poetry and fiction, conversations, monographs in English, and works edited in English and Malayalam. In 1967, Paniker founded Keralakavita, a path-breaking journal exclusively devoted to poetry and poetics, and introduced the new Malayalam poetry to a wider readership by translating poems and editing anthologies.