Khaled Hosseini

A working physician wrote The Kite Runner. Hosseini was born in Kabul, moved with his family to Tehran and then to Paris as his father's diplomatic postings changed, and could not go back after the Saur Revolution. The family sought political asylum in the United States and settled in San Jose. He took a biology degree, then a medical degree, then a residency in internal medicine, and practised for over ten years, stopping about eighteen months after his first novel appeared.

Every novel since has been at least partly set in Afghanistan with an Afghan protagonist. That sounds like a limit and functions as a discipline. His plots turn on a debt one character owes another and cannot repay, and he is entirely unembarrassed about coincidence, about symmetry, about an ending that arrives to settle an account. Literary fiction usually flinches at that. He does not, which is why he is read by people who read one novel a year, and why critics who want their emotion earned in smaller increments find him heavy-handed.

The reach is the other half of the story. For millions of readers he turned Afghanistan from a news dateline into a domestic setting with kitchens and cousins in it. He is a goodwill envoy for the UN refugee agency and runs the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, and the later work leans that way: Sea Prayer is a short illustrated book rather than a novel, and The Kite Runner has been reissued in graphic form.