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How to pronounce Khaled Hosseini: HAH-lehd ho-SAY-nee
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a
diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and
History at a large high school in Kabul. In 1970, the Foreign Ministry sent his
family to Tehran, where his father worked for the Afghan embassy. They lived in
Tehran until 1973, at which point they returned to Kabul. In July of 1973, on
the night Hosseini’s youngest brother was born, the Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was
overthrown in a bloodless coup by the king’s cousin, Daoud Khan. At the time,
Hosseini was in fourth grade and was already drawn to poetry and prose; he read
a great deal of Persian poetry as well as Farsi translations of novels ranging
from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series.
In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry once again relocated the Hosseini
family, this time to Paris. They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by
then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion
of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in
the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini’s family moved to San Jose,
California. They lived on welfare and food stamps for a short while, as they had
lost all of their property in Afghanistan. His father took multiple jobs and
managed to get his family off welfare. Hosseini graduated from high school in
1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor’s degree
in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of
California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in
1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and
began practicing Internal Medicine in 1996. His first love, however, has always
been writing.
Hosseini has vivid, and fond, memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era
Afghanistan, as well as of his personal experiences with Afghan Hazaras. One
Hazara in particular was a thirty-year-old man named Hossein Khan, who worked
for the Hosseinis when they were living in Iran. When Hosseini was in the third
grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Though his relationship with Hossein
Khan was brief and rather formal, Hosseini always remembered the fondness that
developed between them - a relationship that is reflected in his first novel,
The Kite Runner (2003).
He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed. Hosseini is also a U.S. Goodwill Envoy to the UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, and the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.
Khaled Hosseini's website
This bio was last updated on 08/23/2018. In a perfect world, we would like to keep all of BookBrowse's biographies up to date, but with many thousands of lives to keep track of it's simply impossible to do. So, if the date of this bio is not recent, you may wish to do an internet search for a more current source, such as the author's website or social media presence. If you are the author or publisher and would like us to update this biography, send the complete text and we will replace the old with the new.
In a separate interview that follows, recorded in 2003, he discusses his first novel, The Kite Runner.
The Kite Runner helped alter the world’s perception of
Afghanistan, by giving millions of readers their first real sense of what
the Afghan people and their daily lives are actually like. Your new novel
includes the main events in Afghanistan’s history over the past three
decades, from the communist revolution to the Soviet invasion to the
U.S.-led war against the Taliban. Do you feel a special responsibility to
inform the world about your native country, especially given the current
situation there and the prominent platform you’ve gained?
For me as a
writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have
never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly
never with a specific agenda. It is quite a burden for a writer to feel a
responsibility to represent his or her own culture and to educate others
about it. For me it always starts from a very personal, intimate place,
about human connections, and then expands from there. What intrigued me
about this new book were the hopes and dreams and disillusions of these two
women, ...
Farah Ahmedi published her first book when she was a junior in high school. She lives outside of Chicago. (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Kite Runner
Try:
The Other Side of the Sky
by Farah Ahmedi
Jasmine Aimaq was born in Germany to a Swedish mother and Afghan father. At age 4, she moved to Afghanistan with her parents and sister, and attended a French school in Kabul. They left the country in 1976, two years before ... (more)
If you enjoyed:
The Kite Runner
Try:
The Opium Prince
by Jasmine Aimaq
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