 Sugathakumari's elder sister Hridayakumari was a literary critic, orator and educationist.Hridayakumari won the Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award for 1991 for her book "Kalpanikatha", a study on romanticism in Malayalam literature.Sugathakumari's first poem which she published under a pseudonym in a weekly journal in 1957 attracted wide attention.