Is The Kite Runner a True Story? Khaled Hosseini and the Book's Background
Not his story, but his city, his kites and his memories
The Kite Runner is fiction, not a true story. But Khaled Hosseini drew on his own childhood in Kabul in the 1970s, kite flying with his cousins, his family's flight into exile, and life as an Afghan immigrant in California.
Hosseini has said that Amir is not him and that the events of the novel are invented, but the places and the world around them are real.
The Kite Runner in brief
| Fact | Answer |
|---|---|
| Author | Khaled Hosseini, born 1965 in Kabul |
| Published | 2003, Riverhead Books |
| Length | About 370 pages; about 110,000 words |
| Set in | Kabul, Peshawar and Fremont, California |
| Time | The 1970s to 2002 |
| First version | A short story Hosseini wrote around 1999 |
| Later novels | A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), And the Mountains Echoed (2013) |
| Film | 2007, directed by Marc Forster |
Khaled Hosseini's own story
Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965, the son of a diplomat and a teacher. In 1976 his father was posted to Paris, and the family was still abroad when the communist coup of 1978 and the Soviet invasion made it impossible to go home. In 1980 they were granted asylum in the United States and settled in San Jose, California, living for a time on welfare. Hosseini became a doctor and practised medicine for years while writing in the early mornings.
↑ Back to the topWhat parts are real?
The Kabul of Amir's childhood, its streets, cinemas, kite tournaments and the Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood, is the city Hosseini grew up in. The flea market in San Jose, where Afghan families sold goods at weekends, was part of his family's life. He has said that as a boy he taught a Hazara man who worked in his family's home to read and write. He also became aware early on of how Hazaras were treated, which shaped Hassan's story.
↑ Back to the topHow the novel began
Around 1999 Hosseini read a news report that the Taliban had banned kite flying in Afghanistan. It struck him personally, and he wrote a short story about two boys who fly kites in Kabul. In 2001 he came back to the story and began turning it into a novel. The novel was published by Riverhead in 2003, became a word-of-mouth success in paperback and spent years on bestseller lists.
↑ Back to the topWhat happened after the book?
The novel's success let Hosseini turn to writing full time. He became a Goodwill Envoy for the UN Refugee Agency and set up a foundation to help Afghan refugees. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, follows two Afghan women across the same decades, and his third, And the Mountains Echoed, spans several generations and countries.
↑ Back to the topMore about The Kite Runner
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