[5] While growing up in West Sacramento, California, a teacher at River City High School encouraged him to take a creative writing class, leading him into fiction.

[5] He received two master's degrees in creative writing, first from University of California, Davis in 2017 and then from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2019, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow.

[5][1] His first book, a novel titled 99 Nights in Logar, was published by Viking Press in 2019 and was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and shortlisted for the 2019 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

[3] A part of the book is in Pashto without translation, which he said was because he "wanted to upset this notion that, in order for this story to have value, it needed to be made consumable for an English readership.

[2] In an earlier interview with The New Yorker, Kochai discussed writing a story based on a video game set in Afghanistan called Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.