Khaled Hosseini is an Afghanistan-born writer and physician who has written two novels about Afghanistan. He is the son of a diplomat father and a teacher mother. His father was assigned to Iran in 1970, and his family lived there with him until 1973, when the King of Afghanistan was deposed in a coup. The Afghan Foreign Ministry subsequently moved his family to Paris in 1976.
Khaled Hosseini was born in 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan. He immigrated to the United States with his father in 1980, when his father was granted political asylum. They settled in San Jose, California. Khaled Hosseini received a B.A. degree in Biology from Santa Clara University in 1988 and a M.D. from University of San Diego in 1993. He practiced medicine from 1996-2004, specializing in internal medicine, and continues to be associated with a medical group.
Having an interest in writing from his childhood, he published his first novel, The Kite Runner in 2003. Following the success of the book and a subsequent film (2007) based on the book, he turned to writing full-time. He has said in author interviews and the introduction to the movie that The Kite Runner is semi-autobiographical, focusing on people he knew and conditions in Afghanistan when he lived there as a child prior to the Soviet invasion of that country.
Hosseini’s second novel is called A Thousand Splendid Suns, and it concerns living conditions during the Taliban regime, focusing in particular on restrictions placed on women’s lives by Taliban culture. It was published in 2007.
Hosseini currently lives and writes in California.
Web Sites
- Kaled Hosseini's Web site
- Newsline Interview
- Barnes and Noble: Meet the Writers
- National Public Radio Interview
- Internet Movie Database
- Department of State: Afghanistan
- Afghan-Web
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