Almanac of Story Tellers: Khalen Hosseini

 Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of March 4th

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    It is the 63rd day of the year, leaving 302 days remaining in 2022.

 

Photo by Brian Sokol for UNHCR

   On this date in 1965, the Afghan-American author, Khalen Hosseini, was born in Kabul, Afghanistan.

    He grew up a privileged son of a father who was a diplomat and a mother who was a teacher. But his family had to flee the country after the Soviet invasion in 1979.

    They settled in California, and Hosseini became a doctor. But he longed to write and tell stories of his homeland, so he worked on his first book, The Kite Runner, between his rounds.

    The novel concerns a wealthy young man who befriends the son of a family servant. It was mostly praised by critics, who sometimes critcized it as being melodramatic. But it caught on among ordinary readers and in book clubs, and it soon found itself on best-seller lists. 

    It is also the story of the son trying to form a relationship with his father, through the tumult of Afghan history in the latter part of the 20th Century -- a time of radical changes in governments, war, the Soviet invasion, and the subsequent rise of the repressive Taliban regme.

    The success of the novel allowed Hosseini to write full time, and his second, highly anticipated novel did not disappoint. A Thousand Splendid Suns told the tale of the radical changes in the social and political life of Afghans during the same period, but this time told from the perspectives of two female protagonists. 

    His third novel went back to the 1950s, and told the story of a brother and sister who were separated when the latter is given up for adoption. This time, Hosseini said he wanted to write about the relationships between siblings in multi-generational families.

    Hosseini's books also focused on the refugee problems that arose as the result of Afghanistan's instability.

    Partly as a result, he was appointed as the U.S Goodwill Envoy to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and he founded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a non-profit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan.