Attia Hosain

Attia Hosain (1913-1998) was born in Lucknow and educated at La Martiniere and Isabella Thoburn College. She blended an English liberal education with that of a traditional Muslim household where she was taught Persian, Urdu and Arabic. She was the first woman to graduate from among the feudal ‘Taluqdari’ families into which she was born. Influenced in the 1930s by the nationalist movement and the Progressive Writers’ Group in India, she became a journalist, broadcaster and writer. In 1947, she moved to England and presented her own women’s programme on the BBC Eastern Service for many years, and appeared on television and the West End stage. She is the author of Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961).