Afghan-American author, Khaled Hosseini, will be speaking as a part of the SPA Distinguished Speaker Series on September 30th. The lecture will be at 8:00 p.m. in the Eisenhower Auditorium.

Tickets for this event are first available on September 16th at the regular ticket hours. Admission is free and Penn State Students are given a priority. Two tickets will be available for each Student ID card. The general admission tickets go on sale on Thursday, September 23rd.

Instead of the usual, short question and answer session after the address, Hosseini’s presentation will have an hour-long question and answer session. Questions can be submitted online before the lecture. The topic of this lecture will be The Kite Runner, his first novel. He will be speaking about Afghanistan and the problems that are associated with his homeland.

The Kite Runner, written about a boy in Afghanistan, became an international best seller in 2003. The novel was then made into a film in 2007. His second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns, was published in May 2007.

On his website, it says Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan in 1965 and moved to San José, California in 1980. Before he wrote The Kite Runner, he earned his medical degree, in 1993. He wrote the novel while practicing medicine.

Khaled has been providing humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan through his foundation, The Khaled Hosseini Foundation. Change your views of Afghanistan and that part of the troubled world by reading his book. Whether you’ve read it or not, this is one event you do not want to miss.