Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that can help answer the question.
Query: When was Khaled Hosseini born?
Khaled Hosseini ( ; ; born March 4, 1965) is an Afghan-born American novelist and physician. After graduating from college, he worked as a doctor in California, a predicament that he likened to "an arranged marriage." He has published three novels, most notably his 2003 debut "The Kite Runner", all of which are at least partially set in Afghanistan and feature an Afghan as the protagonist. Following the success of "The Kite Runner" he retired from medicine to write full-time.
According to his autobiography, Yohannan Hormizd was born in 1760 in Alqosh to an Assyrian family. His father, the deacon Hanna (Yohannan), was the brother of the Mosul patriarch Eliya XII Denha (1722–78).
Christopher Hitchens was the author of "God Is Not Great" and was named among the "Top 100 Public Intellectuals" by "Foreign Policy" and "Prospect" magazines. In addition, Hitchens served on the advisory board of the Secular Coalition for America. In 2010 Hitchens published his memoir "Hitch-22" (a nickname provided by close personal friend Salman Rushdie, whom Hitchens always supported during and following "The Satanic Verses" controversy). Shortly after its publication, Hitchens was diagnosed with esophageal cancer, which led to his death in December 2011. Before his death, Hitchens published a collection of essays and articles in his book "Arguably"; a short edition "Mortality" was published posthumously in 2012. These publications and numerous public appearances provided Hitchens with a platform to remain an astute atheist during his illness, even speaking specifically on the culture of deathbed conversions and condemning attempts to convert the terminally ill, which he opposed as "bad taste".
Irfan Khan was born on May 5, 1982 in Mardan, Pakistan his father worked as a Manager for a Pakistani Bank. Irfan started his education at the age of 6 in Swat and later on in Azad Kashmir. He did his Matriculation examination (10th grade) from Peshawar Model School, intermediate examinations (12th grade) from Edwardes College, Peshawar and got his BA Degree in Communication Design from the University of Peshawar and Degree in hospitility and hotel management
Costello was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Irish immigrants Ellen (née Fitzgerald; born 1853) and Thomas Costello (born 1852). He made his film debut in 1908, but was long believed to have debuted in "Adventures of Sherlock Holmes; or, Held for Ransom" (1905), supposedly playing the lead in what is regarded as the first serious film to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes, since it was preceded only by the 30-second comedy film "Sherlock Holmes Baffled" (1900). However, Holmesian scholar Leslie S. Klinger has written that the identification of Costello in the role is flawed. Klinger states that the first identification of Costello with the role was in Michael Pointer's "Public Life of Sherlock Holmes" published in 1975 but Pointer later realized his error and wrote to Klinger stating
Farah Swaleh Noor was 38 years old at the time of his death. He arrived in Ireland in December 1996, claiming to be a Somalian called "Sheilila Salim" whose family had been killed in Mogadishu during the Somali Civil War. Subsequent investigations revealed that he was in fact Kenyan and that his family was still alive. The Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform ordered that he be deported but he appealed and was granted Irish citizenship in March 1999 on grounds he became the father of an Irish-born child. He had four previous convictions for offences including intoxication, threatening and abusive behaviour and assault. In 1997, he raped a mentally disabled 16-year-old Chinese girl. She later gave birth to a son. Two other women had children by him and both described having been raped by him. Noor had faced eight charges of disorder and assault, one involving a sexual assault in which a knife was found at the scene by gardaí. He was convicted on three occasions but never served time in jail. Noor lived in a number of areas in Dublin, including Dún Laoghaire and Firhouse, as well as the inner city before moving in with Kathleen Mulhall. Gardaí described him as being particularly violent towards women.
Heller was born in 1929. It is well known that she is the most prominent philosopher and aesthetician from Budapest School, and one of the most representative critical theorists from Eastern European Neo-Marxists. She has published more than forty books on social theory, the theory of history, the philosophy of ethics and moral and political philosophy. Since 1990s, she has been paying more attention to issues of aesthetics.Fehér wrote an important book called Paradoxical poet in the early 1970s under the influence of Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel, and later published some writings about aesthetics and political philosophy with Agnes Heller in Australia and the U.S. He died in 1994.
Lakshmi Dhar Kalla (1891-1953), a Sanskrit scholar and a Kashmiri Pandit, wrote a book titled "The birth-place of Kalidasa" (1926), which tries to trace the birthplace of Kalidasa based on his writings. He concluded that Kalidasa was born in Kashmir, but moved southwards, and sought the patronage of local rulers to prosper. The evidence cited by him from Kalidasa's writings includes:According to folklore, once a scholarly princess decided to find a suitable groom by testing men in her kingdom for their intelligence. When no man could pass the test, the frustrated citizens decided to send Kalidasa, an unintelligent man, for an interview with the princess. Kalidasa fared poorly, and was greatly humiliated by the princess. Challenged by the princess, he visited a Kali temple, and was inspired to learn Sanskrit; he studied the Puranas and other ancient texts, and become a great poet. He then wrote three epics starting with the words of his insult: "अस्ति कश्चित् वाग्विशेश?".
Hitchens attended Mount House School (now absorbed into Mount Kelly) in Tavistock, Devon, from the age of eight, followed by the independent Leys School in Cambridge. In 1967, Hitchens enrolled at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was tutored by Steven Lukes and Anthony Kenny and read Philosophy, Politics and Economics, graduating in 1970 with a third-class degree. Hitchens was 'bowled over' in his adolescence by Richard Llewellyn's "How Green Was My Valley", Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment", R. H. Tawney's critique on "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism," and the works of George Orwell. In 1968, he took part in the TV quiz show "University Challenge".
Hitchens did not leave his position writing for "The Nation" until after the September 11 attacks, stating that he felt the magazine had arrived at a position "that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". The 11 September attacks "exhilarated" him, bringing into focus "a battle between everything I love and everything I hate" and strengthening his embrace of an interventionist foreign policy that challenged "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan described him as representing the anti-totalitarian left. Hitchens recalls in his memoir having been "invited by Bernard-Henri Levy to write an essay on political reconsiderations for his magazine "La Regle du Jeu". I gave it the partly ironic title: 'Can One Be a Neoconservative?' Impatient with this, some copy editor put it on the cover as 'How I Became a Neoconservative.' Perhaps this was an instance of the Cartesian principle as opposed to the English empiricist one: It was decided that I evidently was what I apparently only thought." Indeed, in a 2010 BBC interview, he stated that he "still [thought] like a Marxist" and considered himself "a leftist."
James Ley of "The Sydney Morning Herald", while stating that "there is much about Hitchens's support for Bush that still sits oddly", nevertheless lauded the work as "probably the best all-round selection of [Hitchens's] writings yet published. [...] Hitchens is an effortlessly engaging writer and a famously pugnacious commentator, but the sheer scope of "Love, Poverty and War" is testament to his erudition. There are few writers who can turn from a long and detailed reassessment of the legacy of Winston Churchill to the work of Marcel Proust and feel equally at home." In "Prospect", David Herman argued that the collection solidified Hitchens as "one of the best literary and cultural critics of the past 20 years", praising the author's writings on Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Proust, and "The Adventures of Augie March". David Free of "The Australian" wrote that the essays written in the wake of the September 11 attacks "will go down as classics of American journalism."
The poet Sorley MacLean was born on Raasay, the setting for his best known poem, "Hallaig". George Orwell wrote much of the novel "1984" whilst living at Barnhill on Jura and J.M. Barrie wrote a screenplay for the 1924 film adaptation of "Peter Pan" whilst on Eilean Shona. Cressida Cowell, the author of "How to Train Your Dragon", spent childhood summers in the Inner Hebrides and has stated that they are "one of the most beautiful places on Earth" and "the kind of place where you expect to see dragons overhead".
Hitchens died of hospital-acquired pneumonia on 15 December 2011 in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62. In accordance with his wishes, his body was donated to medical research. "Mortality", a collection of seven of Hitchen's "Vanity Fair" essays about his illness, was published posthumously in September 2012.
Zechariah (Yaḥya) al-Ḍāhirī (, , b. "circa" 1531 – d. 1608), often spelled Zechariah al-Dhahiri () (16th century Yemen), was the son of Saʻīd (Saʻadia) al-Ḍāhirī, from Kawkaban, in the District of al-Mahwit, Yemen, a place north-west of Sana’a. He is recognized as one of the most gifted Yemenite Jewish poets and rabbinic scholars who left Yemen in search of a better livelihood, travelling to Calicut and Cochin in India, Hormuz in Persia, Basra and Irbīl in Babylonia, Bursa and Istanbul in Anatolia, Rome in Italy, Aleppo and Damascus in Syria, Safed and Tiberias, as well as Jerusalem and Hebron in the Land of Israel (then part of Ottoman Syria), Sidon in Ottoman Lebanon and Egypt, and finally unto Abyssinia where he returned to Yemen by crossing the Erythraean Sea and alighting at a port city near Mocha, Yemen. He wrote extensively about his travels and experiences in these places, which he penned in a Hebrew rhymed prose narrative, and eventually publishing them in a book which he called Sefer Ha-Mūsar ("The Book of Moral Instruction"), in circa 1580.
He was only 24 years old when his first novel, "Captain of the Steppe", was published, receiving praise not only from critics but also from the jury of the Russian Booker Prize, which shortlisted the novel for the 1995 award. Pavlov went on to win the Prize in 2002 with his next book, the second novel in what would become the trilogy "Tales from the Last Days".
Foden's first novel "The Last King of Scotland" (1998), is set during Idi Amin's rule of Uganda in the 1970s. It won the Whitbread First Novel Award, a Somerset Maugham Award, a Betty Trask Award and the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. The feature film, "The Last King of Scotland" (2006) starring Forest Whitaker, is based on Foden's novel with considerable differences, and Foden himself makes a brief cameo as a journalist at one of Amin's press conferences. His second novel, "Ladysmith" (1999), is set during the Anglo-Boer War in 1899 and tells the story of a young woman, Bella Kiernan, who becomes caught up in the Siege of Ladysmith. The book was inspired by letters written by Foden's great-grandfather, Arthur Foden, a British soldier in the Imperial Yeomanry in South Africa during the conflict.
"Oshin" is based on the fictional biography of a Japanese woman, modeled after the mother of Kazuo Wada, a Japanese businessman who created Yaohan, a Japanese supermarket chain. The structure of the story was developed through a collection of anonymous letters assembled by . "It is the untellable past of a woman of the Meiji period, composed right on her deathbed," Hashida said. "I felt that the telling of her hardships while serving as an apprentice and being sold at a brothel was an obligation our generation needed to honor. However, the themes were so harsh and dark that the show was rejected by every [Japanese] television network. Even NHK opposed it.” Hashida said she was told "We can't confront Meiji issues." It was settled when then-station director gave his approval.
Atta was born in 1968 in a small town in Egypt's Nile Delta. He was 10 years old when he moved with his family to the Abdeen section of Cairo. Atta studied architecture at Cairo University, graduating in 1990, and continued his studies in Germany at the Hamburg University of Technology. In Hamburg, Atta became involved with the al-Quds Mosque, where he met Marwan al-Shehhi, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Ziad Jarrah, together forming the Hamburg cell. Atta disappeared from Germany for periods of time, spending some time in Afghanistan, including several months in late 1999 and early 2000 when he met Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda leaders. Atta and the other Hamburg cell members were recruited by bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the "planes operation" in the United States. Atta returned to Hamburg in February 2000, and began inquiring about flight training in the United States.
During a part of Ghani Khan’s life, modern-day Pakistan did not exist. India was under British rule (hence called British India) and was fighting for its independence from the British. On August 15, 1947, India finally gained its independence. And a day before, on August 14, 1947, Pakistan had been born, becoming independent of British India. Hence, before all this independence, the Pashtuns who are now in Pakistan (all except the Swati Pashtuns, since Swat was an independent, princely state until 1964) were under the rule of British India before the partition of India and Pakistan. This is where and why Bacha Khan’s work was significant.
He is the author of fourteen novels, seven collections of essays, an extensive journalistic work, together with a series of short stories and poems. His narrative fiction has received several distinguished awards. He received encouraging praise for his early novels, Los bogavantes (1970) and La boca del tigre (1971), for which he was awarded the Honour Sash of the SADE (Argentine Society of Writers) and third prize of the National Prize of Argentine Literature respectively. Worldwide acclaim came later for his “Trilogy of the Discovery of America” when he was recognised as one of the masters of Latin America's “New Historical Novel”. The first installment is Daimon (1978), a finalist of the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1982, which he was to win in 1987 for the sequel titled The dogs of paradise (1983). The last installment of the trilogy, El largo atardecer del caminante (1992) was honoured with the Premio Internacional Extremadura-America ’92 of the Spanish Commission for the Fifth Centenary of the Discovery of America. Posse has been the recipient of the Premio Internacional de Novela Diana-Novedades (Mexico) for El viajero de Agartha (1989) and the Literature Prize of the Argentine Academy of Letters (2002) for El inquietante dia de la vida (2001). Abel Posse's novels have been translated into 16 languages. In November 2012 he became an numbered member of the Argentine Academy of Letters.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (, ; 26 October 1919 – 27 July 1980), also known as Mohammad Reza Shah, was the last Shah of Iran from 16 September 1941 until his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution on 11 February 1979. Mohammad Reza Shah took the title "Shahanshah" ("King of Kings") on 26 October 1967. He was the second and last monarch of the House of Pahlavi. Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi held several other titles, including that of "Aryamehr" ("Light of the Aryans") and "Bozorg Arteshtaran" ("Commander-in-Chief"). His dream of what he referred to as a "Great Civilisation" () in Iran led to a rapid industrial and military modernisation, as well as economic and social reforms.
When Khaled Hosseini was a child, he read a great deal of Persian poetry, especially the poems of Sufis such as Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyám, Abdul-Qādir Bēdil, and others. He now calls the collected poems of Hafez, the Divan-e-Hafez, his favourite book. He also cites a Persian translation of Jack London's "White Fang" as a key influence on his youthful imagination, as well as Persian translations of novels ranging from "Alice in Wonderland" to Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer series. He has cited Afghan singer Ahmad Zahir as a key musical influence. He chose songs by Zahir as his two Inheritance Tracks for BBC Radio 4's Saturday Live, "Madar" and "Aye Padesha Khuban" (the latter using words from a poem by the Persian poet Hafez) and two for WNYC's Soundcheck show. On Saturday Live he called Zahir "the Afghan Elvis" and said his music is "one of the seminal memories of my time in Afghanistan".
Khaled Hosseini worked as a medical internist at Kaiser Hospital in Mountain View, California for several years before publishing "The Kite Runner". In 1999, Hosseini learned through a news report that the Taliban had banned kite flying in Afghanistan, a restriction he found particularly cruel. The news "struck a personal chord" for him, as he had grown up with the sport while living in Afghanistan. He was motivated to write a 25-page short story about two boys who fly kites in Kabul. Hosseini submitted copies to "Esquire" and "The New Yorker", both of which rejected it. He rediscovered the manuscript in his garage in March 2001 and began to expand it to novel format at the suggestion of a friend. According to Hosseini, the narrative became "much darker" than he originally intended. His editor, Cindy Spiegel, "helped him rework the last third of his manuscript", something she describes as relatively common for a first novel.
Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan. His father worked as a diplomat, and when Hosseini was 11 years old, the family moved to France; four years later, they applied for asylum in the United States, where he later became a citizen. Hosseini did not return to Afghanistan until 2001 at the age of 36, where he "felt like a tourist in [his] own country". In interviews about the experience, he admitted to sometimes feeling survivor's guilt for having been able to leave the country before the American invasion and subsequent wars.
In 2003, Hosseini released his first novel, "The Kite Runner", the story of a young boy, Amir, struggling to establish a closer rapport with his father and coping with memories of a haunting childhood event. The novel is set in Afghanistan, from the fall of the monarchy until the collapse of the Taliban regime, and in the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically in Fremont, California. Its many themes include ethnic tensions between the Hazaras and the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, and the immigrant experiences of Amir and his father in the United States. The novel was the number one best seller for 2005 in the United States, according to Nielsen BookScan. "The Kite Runner" was also produced as an audiobook read by the author. "The Kite Runner" has been adapted into a film of the same name released in December 2007. Hosseini made a cameo appearance towards the end of the movie as a bystander when Amir buys a kite which he later flies with Sohrab.