Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini (Persian: خالد حسینی‎ [ˈxɒled hoˈsejni]; /ˈhɑːlɛd hoʊˈseɪni/; born 4 March 1965) is an Afghan-American novelist and UNHCR goodwill ambassador.[1][2] His debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success; the book, as well as his subsequent novels, have all been at least partially set in Afghanistan and has featured an Afghan as the protagonist.

Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a diplomat father, Hosseini spent some time living in Iran and France. When Hosseini was 15, his family applied for asylum in the United States, where he later became a naturalized citizen. Hosseini did not return to Afghanistan until 2003[3] when he was 38, an experience similar to that of the protagonist in The Kite Runner. In later interviews, Hosseini admitted to feeling survivor’s guilt for having been able to leave the country prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars.

After graduating from college, Hosseini worked as a physician in California, a situation he likened to “an arranged marriage”.[4] The success of The Kite Runner meant he was able to retire from medicine in order to write full-time. His three novels have all reached various levels of critical and commercial success. The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including three weeks at number one.[5] His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), spent 103 weeks on the chart, including 15 at number one[6][7] while his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed (2013), remained on the chart for 33 weeks.[8][9] In addition to writing, Hosseini has advocated for refugees, including establishing with the UNHCR the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to support Afghan refugees returning to Afghanistan.[10]

Hosseini was born on March 4, 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the eldest of five children.[11] His father, Nasser, worked as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul while his mother worked as a Persian language teacher at a girls’ high school; both originate from Herat.[11] Regarding his ethnicity, Hosseini stated, “I’m not pure anything. There’s a Pashtun part of me, a Tajik part of me.”[12] His mother’s family is believed to be from the Mohammadzai tribe of Pashtuns.[13] Hosseini describes his upbringing as privileged. He spent eight years of his childhood in the upper class Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood in Kabul.[11][12][14] Hosseini does not recall his sister, Raya, ever suffering discrimination for being a female,[14] and he remembers Kabul as “a growing, thriving, cosmopolitan city”, where he regularly flew kites with his cousins.[15]

In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Iran where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran. In 1973, Hosseini’s family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini’s youngest brother was born in July of that year. In 1976, when Hosseini was 11 years old, his father secured a job in Paris, France, and moved the family there.[16] They were unable to return to Afghanistan because of the April 1978 Saur Revolution in which the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power. In 1980, shortly after the start of the Soviet–Afghan War, they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California. Hosseini, then aged 15, did not speak English when he first arrived in the United States. He describes the experience as “a culture shock” and “very alienating”.[16]

Despite their distance from the country’s turmoil, the family was aware of the situations faced by a number of their friends and relatives. Hosseini explained:

We had a lot of family and friends in Kabul. And the communist coup, as opposed to the coup that happened in ’73, was actually very violent. A lot of people rounded up and executed, a lot of people were imprisoned. Virtually anybody [who] was affiliated or associated with the previous regime or the royal family was persecuted, imprisoned, killed, rounded up, or disappeared. And so we would hear news of friends and acquaintances and occasionally family members to whom that had happened, [who] were either in prison or worse, had just disappeared and nobody knew where they were, and some of them never turned up. My wife’s uncle was a very famous singer and composer in Kabul who had been quite vocal about his dislike for the communists and so on, and he disappeared. And to this day, we have no idea what happened to him. So that sort of thing, we began to hear news over in Europe of mass executions and really just horror stories. So it was surreal, and it also really kind of hit home in a very real way.[11]