Khaled Hosseini Interview: Afghanistan's Tumultuous History

Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born American novelist and physician, was born on March 4, 1965 in Kabul, Afghanistan, the eldest of five children. Hosseini describes his early upbringing as privileged for his father, Nasser, was a moderate Muslim who worked as a diplomate for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Kabul while his mother worked as a Persian language teacher at a girls high school. That is to say, his family background laid a solid foundation for him to grow up lightheartedly. Hosseini’s family moved to Iran where his father worked for the Embassy of Afghanistan in Tehran in 1097, and then returned to his birthplace, Kabul, in 1973. In 1976, his father secured a job in Paris, France, and moved the family there. However, they cannot return to Afghanistan anymore because of the April 1978 Saur Revolution which makes Afghanistan in turmoil where the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power. Two years later, shortly after the start of

Nevertheless, the situations in Afghanistan faced by a number of their friends and relative were hard. As Hosseini explained in “Khaled Hosseini Interview: Afghanistan’s Tumultuous History”: we had a lot of family and friends in Kabul. And the communist coup, as opposed to the coup that happened in ’73, was actually very violent. A lot of people rounded up and executed, a lot of people were imprisoned. Virtually anybody that 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, that were either in prison or worse, had just disappeared and nobody knew where they were, and some of them never turned