Ahfazur Rahman, an intellectual, poet, progressive writer and freedom fighter, was born on April 4, 1942, in Jabalpur, India. In 1947, as partition took place, he migrated with his family to Pakistan. During his college days, he joined the National Students Federation (NSF), a left-wing student organization, and led the protests against Field Marshal Ayub Khan's educational reforms. Later, when he arrived in Karachi to pursue his MA in journalism, he continued his efforts to spread progressive ideas through prose and poetry from the NSF platform. After a temporary stint as a lecturer, he entered professional journalism and at the same time became an active member of the Karachi Union of Journalists. During the time of Zia-ul-Haq’s martial law, stringent restrictions were imposed on him, which left him unemployed for a long time. However, in 1985 he moved to China and joined the Foreign Language Press in Beijing, from where he returned to Pakistan in 1993 and joined the daily ‘Jang’ as a magazine editor. In 2002, he bid farewell to ‘Jang’ and took over as the magazine editor of the daily ‘Express’. He was diagnosed with throat cancer a few years ago, after which his health gradually deteriorated, which eventually led him to leave journalism altogether in 2018 and retire to seclusion. He passed away on April 12, 2020, due to the same illness.