Khaled Hosseini
Khaled Hosseini was born in
Afghanistan, the oldest of five children, and spent the first years of his
childhood in the capital city, Kabul. His family lived in the affluent Wazir
Akbar Khan district of the city, in a cultivated, cosmopolitan atmosphere,
where women lived and worked as equals with men. His father worked for the
foreign ministry, while his mother taught Persian literature, and Khaled grew
up loving the treasures of classical Persian poetry. His imagination was also fired
by movies from India and the United States, and he enjoyed the sport of kite
fighting he portrayed so vividly in his book The Kite Runner.
In the early '70s,
Hosseini's father was posted to Afghanistan's embassy in Tehran, Iran, where
young Khaled deepened his knowledge of the classical Persian literary tradition
that Iran and Afghanistan share. Although Afghan culture lacked a long
tradition of literary fiction, Hosseini enjoyed reading foreign novels in
translation and began to compose stories of his own. He also made the
acquaintance of his family's cook, a member of the Hazara ethnic group, a
minority that has long suffered from discrimination in Afghanistan. Young
Khaled Hosseini taught the illiterate man to read and write, and gained his
first insight into the injustices of his own society.
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The Hosseinis were at home
in Kabul when the 200-year-old Afghan monarchy was overthrown in 1973. The
king's cousin, Daoud Khan proclaimed himself president of the new republic, but
a long era of instability had begun. In 1976, Hosseini's father was assigned to
the embassy in Paris and Khaled moved, with the rest of his family, to France.
Although he did not know it at the time, it would be 27 years before he would
see his native country again. Only two years after their arrival in Paris, a
communist faction overthrew the government of Afghanistan, killing Daoud Khan
and his family.
Although the new government
was purging civil servants from the old regime, the Hosseinis still hoped that
they might be able to return to Afghanistan. Infighting among the new leaders,
and armed resistance to the regime in the countryside, plunged the country into
chaos. The Hosseinis were still in France when the Soviet army entered
Afghanistan in December 1979. The Soviets attempted to reinstate their
communist allies, while numerous armed factions attempted to expel them. The
Soviet occupation would last nearly a decade, while 5 million Afghans fled
their country.
A return to Afghanistan was
now out of the question for the Hosseini family, and they applied for political
asylum in the United States. Young Khaled arrived in San José, California in
the fall of 1980 at age 15, speaking almost no English. Having lost everything,
his family subsisted for a time on welfare, and father and son went to work
tending a flea market stall alongside fellow Afghan refugees.
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In his first year of school
in the U.S., Khaled Hosseini struggled with English, but his encounter with
John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel The Grapes of Wrath rekindled
his love of literature, and he began to write stories again, this time in
English. Khaled's father found work as a driving instructor, and the family's
situation gradually improved, but Khaled, as the oldest child, felt a
particular responsibility to succeed in the new country.
Determined to make a better
life for himself and his family, Khaled Hosseini studied biology at Santa Clara
University and medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He
completed his residency at UCLA Medical Center and began medical practice in
Pasadena. Now married, Khaled and his wife Roya decided to return to Northern
California to be nearer their families. Dr. Hosseini joined the Kaiser
Permanente health maintenance organization and settled in Mountain View, California
to start a family.
Throughout his medical
studies, Hosseini had continued to write short stories in his spare time.
Happily settled in his new country, he found his thoughts returning to the land
he left behind. After the departure of the Soviets in 1998, the extremist
Taliban faction had seized control of Afghanistan, imposing a brutal theocratic
rule and providing a base for anti-Western terrorists. Women's rights, which
previous regimes had promoted, were completely eliminated along with all foreign
art or culture. Hosseini felt compelled to tell the world something of the life
he had known before his country was consumed by war and dictatorship. In 2001,
with the encouragement of his wife and father-in-law, he decided to try
expanding one of his stories into a novel.
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For a year and a half, he
rose at four o'clock every morning to work on his novel before a full day of
seeing patients. When the United States and allied countries launched military
operations in Afghanistan, he considered abandoning the project, but with the
defeat of the Taliban, he felt it more important than ever to tell his story to
the world. With the eyes of the world turned on his country, he completed his
tale of two Afghan boys, childhood friends separated by the calamities of war,
and the divergent paths their lives take. Once Hosseini found an agent to
handle the manuscript, the book was soon placed with publisher Riverhead Books,
a division of the Penguin Group. The Kite Runner was
published, with little publicity, in 2003.
Initial sales of the book
in hard-cover were slow, but word of mouth built gradually as copies of the
book were passed from reader to reader. The paperback edition found an
enthusiastic audience around the world. The Kite Runner spent
more than two years on The New York Times bestseller list, and
returned to the list, five years after its initial appearance. As of this
writing, it has sold more than 12 million copies, with editions published in
more than 40 languages. Although it was greeted with acclaim in most circles,
some Afghans objected to Hosseini's portrayal of ethnic prejudice in
Afghanistan. Hosseini had no regrets, and hoped that his treatment of the
subject would spark an overdue dialogue among his fellow countrymen.
Following the success of his
book, Hosseini returned to Afghanistan for the first time in 27 years. He was
shocked by the devastation that years of war had wrought on the city he knew as
a child, but moved to find the traditional spirit of hospitality and generosity
was unchanged. Everywhere, he heard stories of the tragedies his countrymen had
suffered.
Hosseini continued to
practice medicine for a year and a half after his book was published, but the
demands on his time eventually compelled him to take a leave of absence. In
2006, he agreed to serve as a special envoy for the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, assisting displaced persons in war zones around the
world. In this capacity he has traveled to eastern Chad to meet with refugees
from Darfur and returned to Afghanistan to meet with refugees returning from
Iran and Pakistan.
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Since his 2003 visit to
Afghanistan, Hosseini had been at work on a second novel, focusing on the
experience of women in pre-war Afghanistan, during the Soviet occupation and
the civil war, and under the Taliban dictatorship. His new book, eagerly
awaited by an army of readers, was published in 2007. A Thousand
Splendid Suns takes its title from a poem by the 17th century Persian
poet Saib-e-Tabrizi. The story follows two women, Mariam and Laila, both
married to the same abusive man. Like its predecessor, A Thousand
Splendid Suns became a massive international bestseller, topping the
bestseller lists as soon as it was published. The paperback edition spent over
two years on the New York Times bestseller list.
Later that year, The
Kite Runner became a highly acclaimed motion picture, photographed in
Kashgar province in the far west of China. Although the producers of the film
were American, they chose to shoot the film in the Dari language to preserve
the authenticity of the story. A controversy erupted in Afghanistan because a
sexual assault against a young boy is depicted in the film. The child actor and
his family were threatened with violence by traditionalists who believed this
portrayal to be shameful. Release of the film was postponed while the boy and
his family were relocated.
For the time being, Dr.
Hosseini has given up his medical practice to write and continue his work for
the United Nations. His third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, was
hailed by The New York Times as his "most assured and
emotionally gripping story yet." He and his wife Roya, and their two
children, make their home in Northern California.
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