Do we like Khaled Hosseini?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record on refugees, women and free reading, but the sources are thin on some topics, so not a full ten.
Khaled Hosseini is the Afghan-American author behind The Kite Runner. He has told NPR he had “a wonderful childhood in Afghanistan”, and remembers 1970s Kabul as a thriving, open city where women worked as lawyers, doctors and professors. That lost Afghanistan is the emotional engine of his writing and his public advocacy.
There's no scandal to tell here, but there's a stoush. In 2025 the Minnesota Reformer reported that a school district in St Francis pulled The Kite Runner after a complaint, using ratings from a website linked to Moms for Liberty. Hosseini said the stated aim of protecting children was, in his words, “dishonest”, and that the push was about targeting books with diverse viewpoints.
On the harm test, nothing bad turned up. After the Taliban took Kabul in 2021 he urged the US to admit as many Afghans as possible and to keep its borders open. He also pushed for pressure on the Taliban to respect the rights of women and girls. To be straight about the gap: we found nothing from him, good or bad, specifically about LGBTQ+ people.
Nothing new on him lately that we could confirm. The most recent reporting we found was his 2025 comment on the Minnesota book removal, and his big public moment before that was the 2021 Taliban takeover. Beware the junk sites claiming a 2026 scandal; none of it stood up.
The good stuff is mostly about using his platform for other people. In 2021 he warned that the last 20 years of gains for Afghan women could be lost, and said the Taliban had brutalised Afghans. He told AFP that Afghans were right to be scared, and called taking in refugees a moral obligation. That's speaking up for people who can't, and it's been consistent.
So where do we land? He's an author who turned a painful family story into a lifetime of speaking for refugees, and who defends kids' right to read hard books. We couldn't open every page we wanted, so the record is thinner than for some cards, but everything we did read points the same way.