“Growing up, I remember entertaining my friends, my cousins, my siblings with storytelling. I would stage plays. I would write the play and they would act it out. It was my first love.”

Not many of us can pinpoint the exact moment our lives changed forever. For Khaled Hosseini, the New York Times best-selling Afghan American novelist, author of The Kite Runner, as well as two other novels including One Thousand Splendid Suns, and The Mountains Echoed, it was December 27 1979.

As a young boy watching the Soviet Union invade Afghanistan, Khaled knew this was a momentous event. 

Today Dr. Hosseini is an Ambassador for the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) and in this episode of Into The Magic Shop he talks about his experience as a refugee, his own survivor’s guilt, and why the power of stories move us to take action. 

“I believe in the power of storytelling, Jim, I think stories, be they in the form of plays, or films or music, or I happen to be deeply partial to literature, I think they're the single best means we have of feeling empathy for others.”

So what made a successful doctor change course and become a writer, and what is Khaled’s take on war and the refugee crisis?

To find out more, you’ll have to download and listen to this podcast.  

On today’s podcast:

Links:

• United Nations High Commission on Refugees