Khaled Hosseini (/ˈhɑːlɛd hoʊˈseɪni/; Persian/Pashto خالد حسینی [ˈxɒled hoˈsejni]; born March 4, 1965) is an Afghan-American novelist, UNHCR goodwill ambassador, and former physician.

[3] Hosseini was briefly a resident of Iran and France after being born in Kabul, Afghanistan, to a diplomat father.

In later interviews, Hosseini acknowledged that he suffered from survivor's guilt for having been able to leave the country prior to the Soviet invasion and subsequent wars.

[13][14][16] Hosseini does not recall his sister, Raya, ever suffering discrimination for being a female,[16] and he remembers Kabul as "a growing, thriving, cosmopolitan city", where he regularly flew kites with his cousins.

In 1980, shortly after the start of the Soviet–Afghan War, they sought political asylum in the United States and made their residence in San Jose, California.

Virtually anybody [who] was affiliated or associated with the previous regime or the royal family was persecuted, imprisoned, killed, rounded up, or disappeared.

And so we would hear news of friends and acquaintances and occasionally family members to whom that had happened, [who] were either in prison or worse, had just disappeared and nobody knew where they were, and some of them never turned up.

In 2003, Hosseini published his first novel, The Kite Runner, the story of a young boy, Amir, struggling to form a deeper connection with his father and coping with memories of a traumatic childhood event.

The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, as well as in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically in Fremont, California.

Hosseini made a cameo appearance towards the end of the movie as a bystander, when Amir purchases a kite which he, then, flies with Sohrab.

The story is set during Afghanistan's tumultuous thirty-year transition from Soviet occupation to Taliban control and post-Taliban rebuilding.

My new novel is a multi-generational family story as well, this time revolving around brothers and sisters, and the ways in which they love, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for each other.

[12] Sea Prayer, an illustrated short story by Hosseini that was released in 2018, was motivated by the drowning of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, a refugee who was trying to get to Europe from Syria.

[12] As a child, Hosseini read a lot of Persian poetry, especially the works of poets such as Rumi, Omar Khayyám, Abdul-Qādir Bēdil, and Hafez.

[25][26] He has cited Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir as a key musical influence, choosing the songs "Madar" and "Aye Padesha Khuban" as his two Inheritance Tracks during an appearance on BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live, and naming Zahir as "the Afghan Elvis" and stating his music was "one of the seminal memories of my time in Afghanistan".