He was born on July 23, 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan. From the age of three to nine, he lived in the United States, where his father, a university professor, was pursuing his PhD at Stanford University. After that, the family returned to Lahore, where Hamid studied at the Lahore American School.

At the age of eighteen, Hamid moved to the United States to pursue higher education. In 1993, he graduated “with the highest honors” from Princeton University, where his writing teachers were Joyce Carol Oates and Toni Morrison. Hamid began work on his first novel during a seminar taught by Morrison. When he returned to Pakistan, he continued working on the book.

In 1997, Hamid attended Harvard Law School. He found corporate law uninteresting, so for several years he worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company to pay off his student debts. He took three months of vacation a year to finish his debut novel, Smoky Moth (2000). Since then, four more novels have been published: “The Forced Fundamentalist” (2007), “How to Get Damn Rich in Rising Asia” (2013), “Discontent and Civilization: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London (2014), and Escape to the West (2017).

In 2001, Hamid moved to London, planning to stay there for one year. Although he often traveled to Pakistan, he lived in London for eight years and became a British citizen in 2006. In 2004, he joined the consulting firm Wolff Olins, where he worked three days a week to have time for his writing career. He was later promoted to general manager of Wolff Olins’ London office, and in 2015 became the chief executive responsible for narrative writing.

Hamid has written on politics, art, literature, travel, including an Op-Ed piece on Pakistan’s internal divisions and extremism for the New York Times. His journalism, essays and short stories have appeared in the following publications: “TIME, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The International Herald Tribune, Paris Review, etc. In 2013, he was included in the list of “One Hundred Leading Thinkers of the World” according to the magazine “Forbes”.

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In 1621 she married Simon, the son of Mamia II Gurieli. After Simon murdered his father, Mariam’s brother took his sister and took her to Migrelia, in Zugdidi. In 1634, with the permission of the Persian Shah, Mariam married King Rostom of Carthage. The marriage was directed against Teimuraz I and King George III of Imereti. After Rostom’s death in 1658, Mariam married King Vahtang V (Shahnavaz I) of Kartli.

Mariam restored the churches and monasteries destroyed by the conquerors, in particular, she rebuilt the Bolnisi Church, renovated the Ruissa Church, and others. Mariam collected and restored Georgian manuscripts, and used her own money to buy valuable parchments. In 1633-1646, with the help of Mariam, the rewritten collection Kartlis Tskhovreba was restored.

Mariam was the daughter of the powerful prince of Odisha (Migrelia) Manuchar I Dadiani, who ruled in 1590-1611. His first wife was Nestan Darejan Bagrationi, the daughter of King Alexander II of Kakheti. It is known that Shah Abbas I wanted to marry Nestan Darejan, but Alexander was categorically against this marriage and immediately married his daughter to Manuchar, the ruler of Odisha (Migrelia).

According to the Russian ambassadors Kuzma Sovin and Andrei Polukhanov, Manuchar married Nestan Darejan in 1596. Based on this date, as well as on the information of Arcangelo Lamberti, the historian Ilya Antelava accurately calculated the date of birth of Levan, the firstborn son of Manuchar and Nestan Darejan, in 1597, which was also the year of Nestan Darejan’s death (Vakhushti Bagrationi wrote that “Nestan Darejan died in childbirth”).

After mourning for Nestan Darejan, according to Vakhushti, Manuchar married Vakhtang’s widow Gurieli and the daughter of the atabagh. Bari Egnatashvili also writes that Mariam was the daughter of the atabagh’s daughter. According to an anonymous Georgian chronicler, Mariam’s mother’s name was Tamar. Based on this information, it is believed that Mariam’s mother was Tamar Dzhakeli, whose son from her first marriage was Kaihosro I Gurieli, a politician of western Georgia who ruled Guria in 1639-1658. Manuchar and Tamara Dzhakeli had four children: Erekle, Iese, Mariam, and another daughter whose name has not been preserved (the materials of the Russian embassy of 1652 mention Levan’s second sister Dadiani, who was sent to the Shah of Iran). It is not known which of the children-Jese, Erekle, Mariam, or an unnamed sister-was older. If we assume that Mariam was older, then her year of birth could not have been earlier than 1599. It is known that Mariam married Simon Gurieli in 1621, and in Georgia at that time it was forbidden to marry under the age of 12. Taking this law into account, Mariam could not have been born later than 1609, so she was most likely born between 1599 and 1609.

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After school, Khaled Hosseini was a student at Santa Clara University and upon graduation in 1988 received a bachelor’s degree in biology. Khaled continued his education at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine and graduated with an M.D. in 1993.

From 1996 to 2004, Khaled Hosseini worked as a physician at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and graduated with an MD in 1993. Khaled Hosseini worked as an internist at the Los Angeles Medical Center. In parallel with his main activity in 2001 he began work on his first novel “Running after the Wind”, which was published in 2003 and brought the author fame around the world. The next work of Khaled Hosseini “A Thousand Shining Suns” was no less successful and kept in the bestseller list for a whole year. In 2013, the third novel “And the echo flies on the mountains” was published, and the writer continues to work on new bestsellers.

In 2006, Khaled Hosseini was appointed an envoy for the United Nations Refugee Agency and later founded his own foundation, The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan.

Khaled Hosseini currently resides in Northern California with his wife and two children.

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Even the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner is not immune to constant self-deprecation and life upheavals. “I ask myself this question every night when I’m trying to sleep for hours,” Malala Yousufzai replies when I ask her how she sees herself in ten years.

Malala, who is only 23 years old, continues: “Where will I live next? Should I continue to live in the UK or should I move to Pakistan or another country? Who should I live with? Should I live alone or with my parents as I am now? They love me very much, and like any Asian parent, they want their children to be with them forever.”

We are sitting in a quiet corner of a hotel in central London. Malala’s hair is loose and uncovered, and she wears a scarf around her neck. “I wear it mostly on the street or in public places,” she says. Her cautious security detail is nearby. “When I’m at home or with friends, I don’t have to.” She explains that the headscarf is about more than just observing Muslim traditions. “For us Pashtuns, it is a cultural symbol that shows where I come from. Often Muslim girls wearing traditional clothing are considered oppressed, voiceless, or living in a patriarchy. I want to say to everyone that each of us can have our own voice within our own culture, and you can have equality in your own culture.”

Malala Yousufzai launched the campaign for girls’ rights to education almost thirteen years ago, when she was just 11. All these years, this has been Malala’s main message to the world. During the Taliban rule in Mingora, a town in Pakistan’s Swat Valley, all girls were banned from attending school. Her desire to learn led to an attack on her life at the age of 15. Taliban militants shot at her and two other classmates while they were traveling home from school on a bus. It was in October 2012. She and her family were taken to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham. After the move, Malala’s activism only grew stronger.

Her autobiography, I, Malala, published just a year after the assassination attempt, became an international bestseller. At the age of 15, she founded the Malala Fund, with which she organized campaigns aimed at freeing schoolgirls held captive by the Nigerian terrorist organization Boko Haram. She has met with presidents and prime ministers, addressed the United Nations Youth Assembly on her 16th birthday, and at 17, she won the Nobel Peace Prize while preparing for language exams in her new hometown of Birmingham. In 2017, she entered Oxford University to study politics, philosophy, and economics and graduated with honors. All of this shows that there are hopeful people, and then there is Malala.

Despite all these merits, I am sitting in front of a 23-year-old graduate who, like all of us, has had many trips interrupted by the pandemic, lives with her parents, often plays video games while locked in her room, and tries to work. So what does the most famous Oxford graduate want at the moment?

First, a little existential panic. “It was two o’clock in the morning,” Malala recalls, “I’m sitting in bed, looking at my personal Instagram and thinking: “What am I even doing?” After returning home from university last March to get her degree and wait out the pandemic, she became a member of the Covid class of 2020: unemployed, aimless, bored. In her childhood bedroom, she assessed her options. Naturally, her work with Malala Fund will continue, but at the same time, she is now at a major crossroads in her life.

Should she look for a job? Should she apply for a master’s degree? Travel the world? In the meantime, she slept, enjoyed her homemade lamb curry, and read (Malala has set herself the task of reading 84 books this year). “I had a secret Twitter account for about a year,” she says, “before I officially joined the network, I had about 4,000 followers.” (Yusufzai now has about 1.8 million followers and counting.)

The inspiration came unexpectedly from her favorite television. She had always known the power of storytelling – when she was 11, Malala started a BBC blog under the pseudonym Gul Makai, describing what it was like to live under Taliban rule. Like the Sussexes and Obamas, who turned to broadcasting to communicate with the public on issues that mattered to them, Malala began thinking about creating her own programs and attracting talent from around the world.

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He worked as a civil servant until 1972, first in the Ministry of Mortmain Endowments, then as director of censorship at the Bureau of Arts, director of the Cinema Support Fund, and finally as a cultural consultant at the Ministry of Culture.

Naguib Mahfouz was a liberal author by Egyptian standards, and his books were disliked by Islamists. In 1994, the writer was attacked with a knife by a fanatic and seriously wounded. After this incident, Mahfouz’s health deteriorated, but he continued to write. In July 2006, Mahfouz was hospitalized and never left the hospital until the day of his death.

Naguib Mahfouz’s first works, which portray traditional national values in a realistic way, were published in the magazine Al-Majallah Al-Jadida by its editor, the well-known Egyptian journalist Salama Moussa. Moussa influenced the young Mahfouz, and when he began writing, he said, “You have potential, but you haven’t developed it yet.”

His first collection of short stories (“A Whiff of Madness”) was published in 1938. It was followed by a series of historical novels written in a romantic manner and devoted to the times of the Pharaohs.

Mahfouz’s prose gained European recognition in the late 1950s with the publication of his “Cairo Trilogy” (“Bein al-Kasrain”, “Qasr al-Shawk” and “al-Sukkariyya”). Describing the lives of three generations of a Cairo family, the author depicts social and political events in Egyptian history.

In the 1960s there are changes in Mahfouz’s work. He gravitates towards small forms (short stories) and leaves more space for the symbol. The sense of constant anxiety and suffering caused by the evolution of society, where man feels increasingly lonely and abandoned, resounds in such works: “The Thief and the Dog” (1961), “The Light of God” (1963), “Quail and Autumn” (1964), “The Way” (1964), “The Poor Man” (1965), “Chatter Over the Nile” (1966), “The Black Cat Tavern” (1968), and “The Honeymoon” (1971).

In total, Mahfouz wrote about five dozen novels and novellas, more than a hundred short stories.

More than half of his novels have been screened. The films are popular in the Arab world. He has a lifetime bronze monument in the Muhandisin neighborhood of Cairo.

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