Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini (born 1965) is an Afghan-American novelist, UNHCR goodwill ambassador and former physician whose debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success, followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) ^{1 2}.

Hosseini was born on 4 March 1965 in Kabul, the eldest of five children of a diplomat father and a Persian-language teacher mother, and spent a privileged childhood in the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood ^{1 2}. The family moved to Tehran in 1970 and to Paris in 1976, and in 1980, after the Soviet invasion, sought asylum in the United States, settling in San Jose, California ¹. He studied biology at Santa Clara University and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and practised internal medicine for more than a decade ¹.

The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, and his three novels have all been set at least partly in Afghanistan with Afghan protagonists, spreading awareness of Afghanistan's people and culture ^{1 2}. He is a Goodwill Envoy for the UNHCR and established the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to support Afghan refugees returning home ¹. His short work Sea Prayer (2018) was inspired by the drowned Syrian child Alan Kurdi, with proceeds to the UNHCR and his foundation ¹. Hosseini has described himself in his own words as a secular Muslim, a self-description that names no school, so his faith is recorded as unknown with that statement preserved in the data note ^{1 2 3}.

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