| Khaled Hosseini خالد حسینی | |
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Khaled Hosseini at the White House |
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| Born | Khaled Hosseini March 4, 1965 Kabul, Afghanistan |
| Occupation | Novelist, physician |
| Language | English |
| Citizenship | American |
| Period | 2003 – present |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Notable work(s) | The Kite Runner A Thousand Splendid Suns |
| Spouse(s) | Roya Hosseini |
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www.khaledhosseini.com |
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Khaled Hosseini (Persian: خالد حسینی [ˈxɒled hoˈsejni]; English: /ˈhɑːlɛd hoʊˈseɪni/;[1] born March 4, 1965), is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician. [2][3] 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, selling more than 12 million copies worldwide.[4] His second, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was released on May 22, 2007.[5] In 2008, the book was the bestselling novel in Britain (as of April 11, 2008), with more than 700,000 copies sold.[6]
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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, 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, 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).[7] He lives in Northern California with his wife, Roya, and their two children.
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,[8] 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.