Khaled Hosseini

Afghan American novelist and former physician Khaled Hosseini writes about Afghanistan, exile, family bonds and the lasting consequences of betrayal and war.

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About Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965. His family moved to Paris when he was a child, then sought asylum in the United States after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He studied medicine and worked as an internist before becoming known as a novelist. Since 2006, he has also served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

His fiction places intimate relationships against Afghanistan’s upheavals and the experience of displacement. Fathers and sons, friendship, guilt, separation and the possibility of atonement recur across his work. His storytelling is direct and emotionally charged, often following characters over decades and across borders.

The Kite Runner, published in 2003, was his debut. It follows Amir, a privileged Kabul boy, and Hassan, the devoted son of his father’s servant. A kite-fighting tournament and its brutal aftermath shape Amir’s life, eventually drawing him back toward Afghanistan and the wrong he failed to confront. The novel was adapted into a 2007 film. Hosseini’s later books include A Thousand Splendid Suns, And the Mountains Echoed and the illustrated short work Sea Prayer.

Begin with The Kite Runner. It introduces the concerns that define Hosseini’s fiction through a compelling story of friendship and moral failure, while tracing Afghanistan’s transformation from Amir’s childhood in Kabul to Taliban rule and exile in America.

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The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner is a first-person novel about Amir, a privileged boy growing up in Kabul, and Hassan, the Hazara son of a servant in Amir’s household. Their intimacy is genuine but structurally unequal: affection, dependence, ethnicity, social rank, and Amir’s desire for his father’s approval all shape what the boys can ask of one another. After Amir witnesses a brutal assault and fails to help Hassan, fear and shame lead him into a further betrayal. The narrative follows the long consequences of that failure. Political upheaval drives Amir and his father from Afghanistan to the United States, where their social positions change dramatically. Amir builds an adult life in California, but migration does not erase his memory or responsibility. A summons from the past eventually returns him to an Afghanistan transformed by war and Taliban rule, where an attempt to help Hassan’s son becomes both a rescue mission and a test of whether remorse can produce meaningful action. Although major ev…

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