Afghanistan, March 4th 1965. Just when the country was being converted into a constitutional monarchy, setting off the first sparks of a long period of political turmoil, in its capital Kabul a man was born who later became a literary symbol of Afghan culture during the war of 1978.

Khaled Hosseini’s fame is due to the release of his first book The Kite Runner in 2003, followed by A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007. Before becoming a celebrated author he lived in Kabul until his father Nasser Hosseini, a diplomat, was transferred to the Afghan embassy in Paris, taking the eleven year old Hosseini with him to France in 1976. But when the time came to go back home an internal conflict had surged between the communist government and anti-communist Muslims, and by the end of the 70s the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan. The conflict made it impossible to move to Kabul again, and instead the Hosseinis found political asylum in the United States.

Hosseini grew up in California and after graduating from high school he read biology in Santa Clara University, before deciding to study medicine and completing his residency in 1996. He started working on his first novel in 2001, inspired by a news story on the Taliban who banned kite flying, a very popular sport, one that the author played with his family and friends as a child. Stunned by this, he wrote a short story on two friends running kites in Kabul which later turned into a novel. His return to Afghanistan in 2003 encouraged him to write his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, this time a story of two women from different walks of life and their experiences of marriage.

Even though Hosseini’s memories of life in Kabul before the war have a special place in his heart, he admits that he never lived through warfare and says himself in an interview for The Guardian that his vision is quite “skewed”; but despite this he sets his stories at the time and place of the Afghan war. All his novels are an incredible documentation of love, friendship, and family values concerned with the prospect of a difficult future. Today Hosseini is a doctor, author, the UN-appointed High Commissioner for Refugees and founder of the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, demonstrating that just like in his writing, his life reflects his ability to reveal the story of lost souls hidden beneath the dust of war.

 

Matilde Rossi

 

Image: The Guardian.