Award-winning fiction writer Jamil J. Kochai has been appointed as an assistant professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. He will teach fiction workshop courses beginning in the spring 2026 semester.
Fiction writer Jamil J. Kochai, a National Book Award finalist and former Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Photo credit: Jalil Kochai
Kochai is the author of 99 Nights in Logar (Viking, 2019), a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. His second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022), won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize, the 2024 Clark Fiction Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Zoetrope, The Sewanee Review, VQR, and A Public Space, and they have been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker. He is currently at work on his second novel.
During the 2022-23 academic year, Kochai was one of five artists awarded a highly competitive Hodder Fellowship at Princeton. His other fellowships include a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellowship at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction.
“Jamil Kochai’s work illuminates the struggles of what it is to be human, to want, to need, and to mourn in this complex time in our shared history,” said Acting Director of the Program in Creative Writing A.M. Homes. “His willingness to dig deep, to take risk, and to sit in uncomfortable spaces will be of enormous benefit to our students, many of whom are wrestling similar questions in their own lives as they seek to reconcile personal and cultural histories with ambitious visions for the future. We are thrilled to welcome him as a colleague.”
Kochai was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but his family originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He is a graduate of California State University, Sacramento, University of California, Davis, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at University of Iowa, where he received his M.F.A.
Kochai’s stories bring his contemporary Afghan characters to life, moving between modern-day Afghanistan and the Afghan diaspora in America, as they grapple with the ghosts of war and displacement. Kirkus Reviews calls The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories, “A master class in storytelling, and a beautiful reflection on a people that have endured decades upon decades of tragedy. Stunning, compassionate, flawless.”
Previously, Kochai was an assistant professor in the English Department at California State University, Sacramento.
Members of the creative writing faculty include Katie Farris, Aleksandar Hemon, A.M. Homes, Ilya Kaminsky, Yiyun Li, Patricia Smith, Lloyd Suh, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and several distinguished lecturers. Through the program’s courses, students can pursue original work at both introductory and advanced levels in fiction, poetry, screenwriting and translation under the guidance of these practicing, award-winning writers. Students can earn a minor in creative writing in addition to their degree in a major. Each year 25 to 30 seniors work individually with a member of the faculty on a creative writing thesis, such as a novel, screenplay, or a collection of short stories, poems, or translations.
“It’s such a tremendous honor to be joining the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton,” said Kochai. “I look forward to working alongside my new colleagues and to offering my students new and old ways to think about storytelling. ”
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Program in Creative Writing and the more than 100 performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, and lectures presented each year by the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of them free.
