Born on 5 July 1944 in Amritsar, Punjab during the British colonial days, Irfan Husain migrated to Pakistan with his parents in 1947 and settled down in Karachi. His father Dr. Akhtar Hussain Rajpuri was a well-known journalist and scholar while his mother Hamida was also a writer.

Irfan’s primary and high school education was at St. Patrick’s High School, Karachi. In the interim, he also studied at Paris, France while his father was working for UNESCO.  Right after completing his F.Sc., he joined METU as a freshman in Chemical Engineering in 1962, having been granted the CENTO scholarship. A year later, he moved back to Karachi and completed his B.A. and M.A. in Economics from University of Karachi in 1967.

After graduation, he qualified for the civil service examination and remained a CSP officer for 30 years. He was a speech-writer for Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and also served as Information Minister at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington DC during Benazir Bhutto’s first tenure as prime minister in 1989-1990. He took early retirement from civil service in 1997 and set up and managed the Textile Institute of Pakistan.

In parallel, he used to be a freelance writer since 1970 and wrote weekly columns for DAWN newspaper on a wide range of subjects. While he was working with the government, he used to write under pseudonyms, the most famous being Mazdak.

Among his books is Fatal Faultlines: Pakistan, Islam and the West, publisher: Arc Manor, 2011 referring to post 9/11 issues. 

His wife was Charlotte Breese from whom he had one son Shakir Husain.

He spent the last few years mostly in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the UK.

He had been diagnosed of a rare type of cancer in 2017 and was subjected to chemotherapy until his death three years later on 16 December, 2020 at Dorset, England.