Jamil Jan Kochai Books in Order

Jamil Jan Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. His family comes from Logar, Afghanistan, and he arrived in California as an infant before growing up in West Sacramento. At home, family stories, Pashto, and memories of a place left behind were part of everyday life.

School gave him an early push toward writing. An elementary-school teacher helped him learn English, and a teacher at River City High School later encouraged him to take a creative writing class. At Sacramento State, he kept going, workshopping an early story and finding mentors who took his work seriously.

Kochai studied English at California State University, Sacramento, then earned a master's degree in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. He went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop as a Truman Capote Fellow, and later held fellowships at Stanford and Princeton. Along the way, he learned to trust a style that could hold Pashto and Farsi alongside the language and slang of Northern California.

The stories were already there.

His first novel, 99 Nights in Logar, came out in 2019. It follows twelve-year-old Marwand, an Afghan American boy visiting family in Logar, who joins his cousins on a search for the family guard dog after a painful encounter sends it running. Kochai drew on his own childhood trip to Afghanistan and a real memory of chasing a dog with relatives, but turned that starting point into a wider story about family, home, war, fear, and the tales people tell to make sense of a life.

Readers who pick up 99 Nights in Logar often find a boys' adventure with plenty of detours. The book moves through jokes, arguments, folklore, danger, and tenderness, while Marwand tries to understand a place that is both his family's home and unfamiliar ground to him. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature.

In 2022, Kochai published The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories. The collection moves between Afghanistan and Afghan American communities in California, with characters facing family pressure, displacement, old grief, political violence, and the oddness of daily life. One story uses a video game to connect a young man with his father's wartime past, while others shift form and viewpoint to follow families across generations. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize.

Humor matters in Kochai's work, even when the subject is painful.

His short fiction and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Sewanee Review, A Public Space, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories. Across his books, he returns to young people, large families, contested memories, and the complicated pull of home. He is at work on a second novel.