Khaled hosseini autobiography

Afghan-American novelist (born 1965)

For other people with similar names, see Khalid Hussain (disambiguation).

Khaled Hosseini (; Persian/Pashto خالد حسینی[ˈxɒledhoˈsejni]; born March 4, 1965) is an Afghan-American novelist, UNHCR goodwill ambassador, and former physician. His debut novel The Kite Runner (2003) was a critical and commercial success; the book and his subsequent novels have all been at least partially set in Afghanistan and have featured an Afghan as the protagonist. Hosseini's novels have spread awareness about Afghanistan's people and culture.

Hosseini was briefly a resident of Iran and France after being born in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a diplomat father. When Hosseini was 15, his family applied for asylum in the United States, where he later became a naturalized citizen. Hosseini did not return to Afghanistan until 2003 when he was 38, an experience similar to that of the protagonist in The Kite Runner. In later interviews, Hosseini acknowledged that he suffered from survivor's guilt for having been able to leave the country prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars.

After graduating from college, Hosseini worked as a physician in California, a situation he likened to "an arranged marriage". The success of The Kite Runner meant he was able to retire from medicine in order to write full-time. His three novels have all reached various levels of critical and commercial success.The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list, including three weeks at number one. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), spent 103 weeks on the chart, including 15 at number one while his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed (2013), remained on the chart for 33 weeks. In addition to writing, Hosseini has advocated for the support of refugees

Your English is virtually unaccented and perfectly fluent, and you write in English. Where did that fluency come from?

Khaled Hosseini: I think part of it is youth.  Farsi was my first language. I learned French when I was eleven, and we lived in France for about four years, so that became my second language. And then we moved to the States, and I was 15 at that time, so I began to pick up English. Actually, I picked up English pretty quickly, probably within a year I was pretty fluent. And part of it is that you’re still very pliable mentally at 14, 15 years old. You still are not fully rooted in that, so you still have that ability to absorb things in a kind of a childlike way. And so I picked up the language pretty quickly. And I think part of it also is that I always had kind of an ease with foreign languages. I always had an ear for it and seemed to pick it up more quickly than some of my friends and fellow students. So I think it was a combination of both things.

As a teenager in America, you really have to learn the idiom, you have to learn the slang fast so you can fit in, right?

Khaled Hosseini: Fitting in in the U.S. when we first moved here — boy, that was quite a difficulty, because I moved to the States when I was 15, and 15 is a strange enough age, regardless of who you are and where you are. And this is a strange enough age if you’re in your own environment, and you are growing up, and you still feel alienated and isolated, and you feel like the world is against you and so on.

You are neither a child nor an adult.

Khaled Hosseini: It’s a cliché, but it’s really true. You really are kind of searching for who you are. You have gone through this period of metamorphosis, both physically and emotionally, mentally in every way. But it’s that much more tricky when you are 15, and you have abandoned everything that you are familiar with, and you have come to an environment where you don’

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat in the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and history at a high school in Kabul. In 1976, the Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris. They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then their homeland had witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet Army. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States, and in September 1980 moved to San Jose, California. Hosseini graduated from high school 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 a medical degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai medical center in Los Angeles and was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.

In March 2001, while practicing medicine, Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, which was published by Riverhead Books in 2003. That debut went on to launch one of the biggest literary careers of our time. Today, Khaled Hosseini is one of the most recognized and bestselling authors in the world. His books, The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed, have been published in over seventy countries and sold more than 40 million copies worldwide.

In 2006 Khaled was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. Inspired by a trip he made to Afghanistan with the UNHCR, he later established The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. He lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.