Her father Shahid Hosain Kidwai, was the Cambridge-educated Taluqdar of Gadia, and her mother, Begum Nisar Fatima came from the Alvi family of Kakori.

In 1933, Attia was encouraged by Sarojini Naidu, "my own ideal of womanhood from childhood", and attended the All India Women's Conference in Calcutta.

[2] In her own words, Attia said, "I had been very influenced by the political thoughts of the Left in the Progressive Writers' Movement, through my friends Mulk Raj Anand, Sajjad Zaheer and Sahibzada Mahmuduzaffar and was asked by Desmond Young to write for The Pioneer.

In the early 1940s the couple moved to Bombay, where Ali Bahadur was in government service, first in the Textile Commission and later as Supply Commissioner for South East Asia after the outbreak of World War II.

"[5] In London, where a diaspora of displaced people had gathered in a post-war world, Attia Hosain became a Qissa-go, the storyteller of her own roots.

The result of this clashing and merging of different cultures was that I, like many others, lived in many worlds of thoughts and many centuries at the same time, shifting from one to the other with bewildering rapidity in a matter of moments", Writing in a foreign tongue by Attia Hosain.

She struggled for harmony between the languages, cultures and beliefs that surrounded her and drew strength from socialism, humanism and enlightened Islam, although she accepted no philosophy without rigorous analysis.

Played various parts, including Lady Macbeth, Desdemona, alongside Zia Moinuddin, Ijaz Hussain Batalvi, Amira Ahuja.

Woman's Hour, "Passport to Friendship", 1965 Audio conversations (public and private) with Literary Estate of Attia Hosain.