Meet the Speaker: Jamil Jan Kochai

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award and a winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. His debut novel 99 Nights in Logar was a finalist for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and a winner of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He earned his Bachelor of Arts in English from California State University, Sacramento, his Master of Arts in Creative Writing from the University of California, Davis, and his Master of Fine Arts at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and The Norton Introduction to Literature. His essays have been published at The New Yorker, Literary Hub, and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He teaches creative writing at Princeton University.