Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan American novelist, former physician, and UNHCR goodwill ambassador whose writing is closely informed by migration and Afghan family life. Born in Kabul in 1965 to a diplomat father, he lived briefly in Iran and France before his family sought asylum in the United States when he was 15. He did not return to Afghanistan until 2003, the year his debut novel, The Kite Runner, appeared; his experience of returning resembles that of the book’s protagonist. Hosseini grew up reading Persian poetry, particularly Rumi, Omar Khayyám, Abdul-Qādir Bēdil, and Hafez, and his fiction combines direct, descriptive storytelling with lyrical passages. His novels show war, displacement, and political upheaval through their effects on relationships among parents, children, siblings, and friends. The Kite Runner centers guilt and exile in a friendship divided by class, while A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two women whose alliance develops amid domestic abuse, civil conflict, and Taliban rule. The illustrated Sea Prayer extends his attention to displacement beyond Afghanistan through a Syrian father’s address to his son.