Khaled Hosseini: Short Biography

Khaled Hosseini is the author of the Kite Runner and a Thousand Splendid Suns. He was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965.
Hosseini's father was a diplomat in the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi at a high school in Kabul. In 1976, Hosseini and his family were relocated to Paris and planned to return to Kabul in 1980, however Afghanistan was being occupied by communist Soviet troops so his family sought asylum in the United States instead. Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 in San Jose, California and went to Santa Clara University for a masters in biology, which he earned in 1988. Afterwards, he enrolled in the University of California, San Diego, where he earned a medical degree in 1993.
Hosseini became a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.
In March 2001, while practicing medicine, he began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, and was published in 2003. The Kite Runner quickly went on to become an international bestseller and literary classic and spent over a hundred weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. His second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was #1 on the New York Times bestseller for 15 weeks, and nearly an entire year on the Bestseller list.
In 2006, Khaled Hosseini became apart of the United Nations Refuge Agency and was named a Goodwill Envoy. Inspired by the trip he made to Afghanistan by the UNHCR, he started the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.