Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini
George and Laura Bush with Khaled Hosseini in 2007.jpg}} | George and Laura Bush with Khaled Hosseini at the White House
Born	March 4 1965 (1965-03-04) (age 43) Kabul, Afghanistan
Occupation	novelist, physician
Nationality	United States  Afghanistan
Writing period	2003 - present
Genres	Fiction
Debut works	The Kite Runner (2003)
Website	khaledhosseini.com

Khaled Hosseini (Persian:خالد حسینی) (pronounced /ˈhɑːlɛd hoʊˈseɪni/ in English^[1]) (born March 4 1965) is an Afghanistani American ^[2][3] novelist and physician. His 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, was a bestseller. His second, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was released on May 22 2007.

Biography

Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan to an ethnic Tajik of kizilbash descent family in Kabul where his father was involved with the Afghanistan Foreign Ministry and his mother was a teacher at a girls high school. In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Tehran, Iran, where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan. In 1973, Hosseini's family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini's youngest brother was born in July of that year. Several months later, the former King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, was ousted from power in a bloodless coup that was orchestrated by Zahir's cousin, Daoud Khan. In 1976, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris and moved the family there. They chose not to return to Afghanistan because communists had seized power through a bloody coup. Instead, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California. Having left Afghanistan with only the clothes on their back, they were forced to subsist on welfare and food stamps for a brief period. Hosseini graduated from Independence High School in San Jose 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, School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. in 1993. He completed his residency in internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles in 1996. He practiced medicine until a year and half after the release of The Kite Runner. He is currently the UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador and lives in California with his family. [1] Being an ethnic Pastun he speaks Pashto as well as Persian.

Influences

When Hosseini was a child, he read a great deal of Persian poetry and Pashto literature as well as Persian translations of novels ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. Hosseini's memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, "I have very fond memories of my childhood in Afghanistan" ^[4] as well as his personal experiences with Afghanistan's Hazara people, led to the writing of his first novel, The Kite Runner. One Hazara man, named Hossein Khan, worked for the Hosseinis when they were living in Iran. When Hosseini was in third grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Although his relationship with Hossein Khan was brief and rather formal, Hosseini's fond memories of this relationship served as an inspiration for the relationship between Hassan and Amir in The Kite Runner.

Novels

• The Kite Runner (ISBN 1-59448-000-1) is the story of a young boy, Amir, juggling to establish a closer rapport with his father and coping with memories of a haunting childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its many themes include ethnic tensions between the Hazara and the Pashtun in Afghanistan, and the immigrant experiences of Amir and his father in the United States. The novel was the number three best seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan.^[5] The Kite Runner was also produced as an audiobook read by the author. The Kite Runner has been adapted into a film of the same name with a release date in December, 2007.
• Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined, was released by Riverhead Books on May 22 2007, simultaneous with the Simon & Schuster audiobook. Movie rights have been acquired by producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures.^[6]

Notes

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Khaled Hosseini

• Official website of Khaled Hosseini
• Interview with Khaled Hosseini
• The New York Times - Wrenching Tale by an Afghan Immigrant Strikes a Chord
• "The Kite Runner Author Returns Home" by Lev Grossman on Time.com (a division of Time magazine)