Jamil J. Kochai

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Jamil Jan 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. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Short Stories 2021. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. Kochai was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. His second book, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories (Viking, 2022), won the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and was a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award in Fiction. During his year as a 2022-23 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, Kochai will be completing his second novel.

Read or listen to a short story: “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak” by Jamil Jan Kochai, published in The New Yorker, Nov. 1, 2021

Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories named Finalist for National Book Award in Fiction | National Book Awards, October 2022

Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak wins the 2023 Aspen Prize | LitHub, April 20, 2023