Khaled Hosseini

Life and exile

Khaled Hosseini, also spelled Khalid Husseini, was born on March 4, 1965, in Kabul, Afghanistan. He is an Afghan and American novelist, a UNHCR goodwill ambassador, and a former physician. The eldest of five children, he grew up in a privileged home in Kabul’s Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood. His father, Nasser, worked as a diplomat for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and his mother taught Persian at a girls’ high school. Hosseini has described his background as mixed, saying, “I’m not pure anything. There’s a Pashtun part of me, a Tajik part of me.”

His childhood was shaped by movement and by Afghanistan’s political upheaval. In 1970, his family moved to Iran, where his father worked at the Embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran, then returned to Kabul in 1973. In 1976, the family moved again, this time to Paris for his father’s work. They could not return to Afghanistan after the 1978 Saur Revolution, when the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan seized power. In 1980, after the start of the Soviet-Afghan War, the family sought political asylum in the United States and settled in San Jose, California. Hosseini was fifteen, could not speak English, and later called the move “a culture shock” and “very alienating.”

Even from afar, Afghanistan remained close to him. His family heard about friends, relatives, and acquaintances in Kabul who had been imprisoned, executed, killed, rounded up, or who had disappeared. Hosseini later acknowledged survivor’s guilt because he had been able to leave before the Soviet invasion and the wars that followed. He did not return to Afghanistan until 2003, when he was thirty-eight, an experience similar to that of the protagonist in his first novel.

Books, medicine, and advocacy

Before becoming a full-time writer, Hosseini trained and worked as a doctor in California. He graduated from Independence High School in San Jose in 1984, earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Santa Clara University in 1988, and received his M.D. from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in 1993. In 1997, he completed his internal medicine residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles. He practiced medicine for more than ten years, up to a year and a half after the publication of The Kite Runner, later likening medicine to “an arranged marriage.”

The Kite Runner, published in 2003, made Hosseini widely known. The novel follows Amir, a boy trying to connect with his father and come to terms with a traumatic childhood event. It is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy to the collapse of the Taliban regime, and also in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Fremont, California. The book spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including three weeks at number one, and was the best selling novel of 2005 in the United States according to Nielsen BookScan. Hosseini also read the audiobook. A film adaptation was released in December 2007, and he made a cameo appearance near the end.

His later novels kept Afghanistan and Afghan lives at their center. A Thousand Splendid Suns, released in 2007, tells the story of two women, Mariam and Laila, during Afghanistan’s transition from Soviet occupation to Taliban control and post-Taliban rebuilding. It spent 103 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including 15 at number one. And the Mountains Echoed, released in 2013, remained on the list for 33 weeks. Across his books, Hosseini has spread awareness of Afghanistan’s people and culture. Beyond writing, he has advocated for refugees and established the Khaled Hosseini Foundation with the UNHCR to support Afghan refugees returning to Afghanistan. His words continue to matter because they are rooted in displacement, memory, family, and the human cost of war.