In London, where a diaspora of displaced people had gathered in a post war world, Attia Hosain became a Quissa goh, the storyteller of her own roots. Her stories appeared in the English magazine Lilliput and the American Journal, the Atlantic Monthly.
Despite her cosmopolitanism, her creative directions as writer, broadcaster with the BBC and actress were enriched by her own identity and diverse cultural strands.
In 1953, Phoenix Fled, her first collection of short stories, which are set just before the partition, was published.[8] In 1961, Chatto and Windus published Sunlight on a broken Column.[9]
For a long time this was thought to be her only published written work, until Distant Traveller, a collection, new & selected fiction was published in 2012, to honour her coming centenary year, which included excerpts of her unfinished novel, No New Lands, No New Seas, set in England. Many of her stories have now been included in other anthologies.
In 1998 Sunlight on a broken Column and Phoenix Fled were re-launched as Virago Modern Classics. Attia Hosian was reborn as a writer enjoying a considerable reputation.[10]
To the young writers, she wrote: "You must keep trying because it is as essential as drawing breath – like exhaling! All the thoughts breathed out and shaping themselves visibly after being inside the cells of the brain, and then released. If you hold your breath and do not breathe out, you will suffocate."
Attia did not apologize for English as her chosen language of expression. "In the struggle for freedom, English was both a weapon, as well as the key to what I might call the ideological arsenal. 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.[11]
To the end of her life, she retained a fierce, iconoclastic political consciousness and was scornful of hypocrisy, extremism and sectarianism. 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.[12]
