Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini (Persian: خالد حسینی )(IPA pronunciation: )(born March 4 1965) is an Tajik-American novelist and physician,who is an ethnic Tajik from Afghanistan. His 2003 debut novel, The Kite Runner, was a bestseller. His second, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was released on May 22 2007.

Biography
Hosseini was born on March 4, 1965, in Kabul, Afghanistan to an ethnic Tajik family of Kizilbash descent. . His father was involved with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother was a teacher at a girls high school in Kabul. In 1970, Hosseini and his family moved to Tehran, Iran, where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan. In 1973, Hosseini's family returned to Kabul, and Hosseini's youngest brother was born in July of that year. Several months later, the former King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, was ousted from power in a bloodless coup that was orchestrated by Zahir's cousin, Daoud Khan.

In 1976, Hosseini's father obtained a job in Paris and moved the family there. They chose not to return to Afghanistan because communists had seized power through a bloody coup. Instead, in 1980 they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California. Having left Afghanistan with only the clothes on their back, they were forced to subsist on welfare and food stamps for a brief period.

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 until a year and half after the release of The Kite Runner.

Influences
When 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 memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, as well as his personal experiences with Afghan Hazaras, 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 Hosseini was in third grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Though 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.

Novels

 * The Kite Runner (ISBN 1-59448-000-1) is the story of a young boy, Amir, juggling to establish a closer rapport with his father and coping with memories of a haunting childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, and in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its many themes include ethnic tensions between the Hazara and the Pashtun in Afghanistan, and the immigrant experiences of Amir and his father in the United States. The novel was the number three best seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. The Kite Runner was also produced as an audiobook read by the author. The Kite Runner has been adapted into a film of the same name with a release date in November,  2007.


 * Hosseini's second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, the story of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, whose lives become entwined, was released by Riverhead Books on May 22 2007, simultaneous with the Simon & Schuster audiobook. Movie rights have been acquired by producer Scott Rudin and Columbia Pictures.