Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini خالد حسینی
Khaled Hosseini at the White House
Born	Khaled Hosseini (1965-03-04) March 4, 1965 Kabul, Afghanistan
Occupation	Novelist, physician
Language	English
Citizenship	American
Period	2003 – present
Genre	Fiction
Notable works	The Kite Runner A Thousand Splendid Suns
Spouse	Roya Hosseini
Website
http://www.khaledhosseini.com/

Khaled Hosseini (Persian: خالد حسینی [ˈxɒled hoˈsejni]; /ˈhɑːlɛd hoʊˈseɪni/; born March 4, 1965), is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician. He is a citizen of the United States where he has lived since he was fifteen years old. His 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, was an international bestseller, with the paperback spending 101 weeks on the bestseller list (#1 for 4 of those weeks). In 2007, it was followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns which has spent 21 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list for paperback fiction and 49 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction (#1 for 15 of those weeks). The two novels have sold more than 38 million copies internationally.

Biography

Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. 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, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris, France, and moved the family there. They were unable to return to Afghanistan because of the Saur Revolution in which the PDPA communist party seized power through a bloody coup in April 1978. Instead, a year after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California.

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 for over ten years, until a year and a half after the release of The Kite Runner.

Hosseini is currently a Goodwill Envoy for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He has been working to provide humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through the Khaled Hosseini Foundation. The concept for the foundation was inspired by the trip to Afghanistan that Hosseini made in 2007 with UNHCR.

He lives in Northern California with his wife, Roya, and their two children (Harris and Farah).

Influences

Khaled Hosseini with actors from The Kite Runner, Bahram and Elham Ehsas.

When Khaled Hosseini was a child, he read a great deal of Persian poetry as well as Persian translations of novels ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. Hosseini's "very fond memories of [his] childhood" in peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, 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 Khaled 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

In 2003, Hosseini released his first novel, The Kite Runner, the story of a young boy, Amir, struggling 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, specifically in Fremont, California. 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. 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 released in December, 2007. Hosseini made a cameo appearance towards the end of the movie as a bystander when Amir buys a kite which he later flies with Sohrab.

Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in 2007, and is also set in Afghanistan. The story addresses many of the same issues as Hosseini's first, but takes a more feminine perspective. It follows the story of two women, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined. The story is set during Afghanistan's tumultuous thirty-year transition from Soviet occupation to Taliban control and post-Taliban rebuilding. The novel was released by Riverhead Books on May 22, 2007, at the same time as the Simon & Schuster audiobook. Movie rights have been acquired by producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures.

On October 29, 2012, Riverhead Books confirmed that Hosseini's third novel And the Mountains Echoed would be released on May 21, 2013. Hosseini said, "I am forever drawn to family as a recurring central theme of my writing. My earlier novels were at heart tales of fatherhood and motherhood. My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other. I am thrilled at the chance to share this book with my readers."

Biographical and critical sources

• Booklist, July, 2003, Kristine Huntley, review of The Kite Runner, p. 1864.
• Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2003, review of The Kite Runner, p. 630.
• Library Journal, April 15, 2003, Rebecca Stuhr, review of The Kite Runner, p. 122; November 15, 2003, Michael Adams, review of The Kite Runner (audio versi

on), p. 114.

• New York Times Book Review, August 3, 2003, Edward Hower, review of The Kite Runner, p. 4.
• Publishers Weekly, May 12, 2003, review of The Kite Runner, p. 43.
• School Library Journal, November, 2003, Penny Stevens, review of The Kite Runner, p. 171.
• Stuhr, Rebecca. Reading Khaled Hosseini. Santa Barbara, Calif: Greenwood Press, 2009.
• Times (London, England), August 30, 2003, review of The Kite Runner, p. 17

See also

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• List of best-selling fiction authors
• Afghan American

External links

• Official website of Khaled Hosseini
• Official website of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Khaled Hosseini on Charlie Rose
• Khaled Hosseini at IMDb
• Khaled Hosseini collected news and commentary at Al Jazeera English
• Khaled Hosseini collected news and commentary at The Guardian
• Khaled Hosseini collected news and commentary at The New York Times
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• Khaled Hosseini at Bloomsbury Publishing
• "The Kite Runner Author Returns Home, Lev Grossman, Time, 17 May 2007