About the Author

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965 and moved to the United States in 1980 with his family after their homeland had witnessed a bloody communist coup during the invasion of the Soviet Army in 1978. 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.

Hosseini was inspired to write a short story that would later become The Kite Runner when he heard that the Taliban had banned kites in Afghanistan. This seemed especially cruel and personal to him, as he, like Amir, grew up flying kites in Kabul.

He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed. When he is not busy writing books, he also serves as a U.S. Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations Refugee Agency, and as the founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation — a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.