Author of Bestseller Book The Kite Runner Was a Primary Care Physician

The Kite Runner (published in 2003) is the first novel by the American author Khaled Hosseini who is originally from Afghanistan.

A lesser known fact is that Hosseini was a practicing primary care physician in California before his book sold 10 million copies worldwide.

The Times interviewed him in the article From Kabul to California: the incredible journey of Khaled Hosseini:

"It is only five years since a doctor called Khaled Hosseini joined ten people in a small bookshop in Peckham for the British launch of his first novel. This was an improvement on his tour through America, where he had been lucky to attract five or six.

April 2008 is rather different. Hosseini, the first Afghan to write novels in English, has become a phenomenon.

In 1980 the family - his parents, their five children, an aunt and a grandmother - responded to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by seeking political asylum in the United States. Hosseini was catapulted into high school in San Jose, northern California and, remarkably, went on to study medicine. He worked as a general practitioner until 18 months after the publication of The Kite Runner.

"I was always a very sensible kid: very responsible, and I was the first born and I chose medicine for those reasons, though I can't say it was my lifelong passion. It was a choice I arrived at through rational thought. The idea that I could become a writer was so ridiculous I never thought about it.”

The 2007 Academy Award-nominated movie The Kite Runner was based on the novel (click here for the official site).


Washington Kite Festival 2006. Link via Gadling.

Image source:
Khaled Hosseini, from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, public domain.