Khaled Hosseini was born Afghanistan in 1965. His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother was a school teacher. In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini family to Paris. They sought and were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, the family moved to San Jose, California.

Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University earning a bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988. He entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. He was a practicing internist between 1996 and 2004.

Hosseini began writing his first novel, The Kite Runner, in March of 2001. It became an international bestseller and was published in 48 countries. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns was published in May of 2007. Hosseini lives in northern California.
 

Geraldine Brooks is an author and journalist who grew up in the Western suburbs of Sydney, Australia. She worked as a reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and as a feature writer focusing on environmental issues.

In 1982 she won a scholarship to the journalism master’s program at Columbia University in New York City. She later worked for The Wall Street Journal covering the crisis in the Middle East., Africa, and the Balkans.

Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel March in 2005. Her novel, Year of Wonders, was an international bestseller. Her most recent novel, People of the Book, was published in 2008. She has also written two non-fiction works.