Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini is an Afghan-American novelist and physician whose books about Afghanistan have sold tens of millions of copies in more than seventy languages.

He was born on 4 March 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the eldest of five children of a diplomat in the Afghan foreign ministry and a Farsi and history teacher at a girls' high school. His early childhood was spent in Kabul and, during a posting, in Tehran.

In 1976 the family moved to Paris with his father's diplomatic assignment, and after the 1978 communist coup and 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan they sought political asylum in the United States, settling in San Jose, California in 1980. He studied biology at Santa Clara University and earned his medical degree from the University of California, San Diego in 1993, then practised internal medicine in the Bay Area.

His debut novel The Kite Runner, written in the early hours before hospital shifts, was published in 2003 and became an international bestseller, followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013). He was named a goodwill envoy for the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR in 2006 and founded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation to provide humanitarian assistance to Afghans.

His name Khaled derives from the Arabic word khālid, meaning "eternal" or "immortal," and is shared with the early Islamic general Khalid ibn al-Walid. Khaled is a masculine given name used widely across Arab and Muslim communities.