Born in 1945 in Meerut, attached to an urban Uttar Pradesh household, Fahmida Riaz grew up in the heartland of Urdu. After the untimely death of her father, Riazuddin Ahmad, in 1950, it was Riaz's mother who took over the role of provider for her family. She provided financial stability and a learning environment at home for her daughters. At school, Riaz became interested in Progressive literature and before long was composing her own verse. As she grew up, she increasingly felt the generational divide between her mother and herself widen, compounded by societal restrictions imposed upon women. In 1963, her first year at Government College for Girls, Hyderabad, she began contributing poems to the literary journal Funun, edited by the eminent writer Ahmad Nadeem Qasimi. While studying for her postgraduate degree programme at Sindh University, she came into close contact with members of the banned Communist Party, fuelling her leftist inclinations in politics. This was a comradeship she had flirted with during her undergraduate years as a member of the Student Union. In 1967 Riaz's marriage was arranged and her academic life abandoned. She moved to England and found herself adopting the role of a housewife. Soon she got pregnant and became a mother. Afterwards she joined the London Film School but her heart remained in Pakistan: ‘I was very deeply involved with the dream of making a social change in Pakistan and becoming a socialist.’ Her marriage ended in divorce and she returned to Karachi in 1973 with her daughter and published a controversial poetry collection entitled Badan darida (The Body Torn) which she had composed in London. Riaz's second marriage was to the political activist Zafar Ali Ujjan in 1976 and coincided with her third publication, Dhup (Sunshine).