Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini (born March 4, 1965, Kabul, Afghanistan) is an Afghan-born American novelist who is known for his vivid depictions of Afghanistan, most notably in The Kite Runner (2003).

Hosseini grew up in Kabul; his father was a diplomat and his mother a secondary-school teacher. In 1976 he and his parents moved to Paris, where his father worked at the Afghan embassy. With the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, they found returning to their home impossible, and they moved to California, having been granted political asylum by the United States.

Hosseini attended Santa Clara University, where he studied biology, and in 1989 he began attending medical school at the University of California, San Diego. He entered private practice as an internist in 1996, three years after receiving his medical degree.

Hosseini began working in 2001 on The Kite Runner, writing at 4:00 am before heading to his medical practice. The novel’s narrator is Amir, a writer who lives in California in the present day but who grew up in the 1970s in Kabul, the privileged son of a wealthy family. Amir’s story centers on his childhood friendship with Hassan, the son of a family servant, and its subsequent dissolution. The Kite Runner was praised for its powerful storytelling, but it was, at times, dismissed by critics for elements considered melodramatic. Nonetheless, the novel soon gained wide popularity through readers’ word-of-mouth praise, and it was eventually published in more than three dozen countries; film and theater adaptations both appeared in 2007.

Prompted by this success, Hosseini turned to writing full-time in 2004. The focus brought by the novel to the continuing Afghan refugee crisis led to his appointment as a goodwill envoy for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 2006.

Hosseini’s second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), was inspired by his observations of women wearing burkas during a 2003 visit to Afghanistan, his first since childhood. Continuing in the overtly topical vein of The Kite Runner, the book depicts the radical shifts in the political and social climate of Afghanistan through the relationship between two women, Mariam and Laila, the first and second wives of an abusive husband.

And the Mountains Echoed (2013) concerns a brother and sister separated when the latter is given up for adoption because of their family’s straitened circumstances. The novel chronicles the decades following the siblings’ divergence in 1950s Afghanistan.

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For his next work, the illustrated short story Sea Prayer (2018), Hosseini drew on the highly publicized death of a three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015. In the book a father reflects on his life as he and his son wait to depart war-torn Syria.