Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner author, at Steinbeck Center. The other Steinbeck Center.

Khaled Hosseini's three novels—The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns and last year's And the Mountains Echoed—have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. Not bad for an Afghan refugee who didn't speak English until he was a teenager.

He's also a medical doctor, a Goodwill Envoy to the UNHCR (the United Nations Refugee Agency) and founder of a nonprofit that provides humanitarian assistance to the people of Afghanistan. For his good works, Hosseini will receive the Steinbeck Award by San Jose State University's Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies (known colloquially as the Steinbeck Center; click here for a story about it), 7:30pm Wednesday, Sept. 10, at the newly built Student Union.

Representatives from Salinas' Steinbeck Center, which collaborates with SJSU's Steinbeck Center, will be in attendance.

The award is given to artists and writers (though Hosseini will be its first fiction writer) whose work, according to the center's website, "captures the spirit of Steinbeck's empathy, commitment to democratic values, and belief in the dignity of people who by circumstance are pushed to the fringes."

He will join a list of past recipients such as John Sayles, Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel, Joan Baez, Sean Penn, Garrison Keillor, Michael Moore, Dolores Huerta, Rachel Maddow and, maybe most significantly for Hosseini, Bruce Springsteen, who was the first recipient of the award back in 1996.

"I came to the U.S. in 1980," Hosseini says, when his family fled their home of Afghanistan. "I learned English on the fly in high school. By the time I was a junior I had a firm grasp on the language. Steinbeck's writing was one of my first experiences with the English language."

The high school teacher whom Hosseini credits with introducing him to English language Western literature—including Chaucer, Shakespeare, Sinclair, Melville and Hemingway—is Janet Sanchez, whom Hosseini says "guided students with a gentle hand." She will be in attendance at her former student's award ceremony. She assigned him Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which he particularly connected with.

"I developed a close relationship to that book. There were scenes in the book that spoke to me personally, that I related to growing up in Afghanistan," Hosseini says. "Displacement, [being] uprooted, the loss of property and dignity, depending on the kindness of others, financial hardship, an uncertain future. That was part of my personal experience as political refugee. My family lost our home, business, land, some people as well. Something about what [Steinbeck] was writing spoke to me in a powerful way. It reminded me of what was going on in Afghanistan at that time, millions of people fleeing Soviet War and living in refugee camps."

That shared experience seems to have infused in Hosseini a connection to current refugees, for which he established the Khaled Hosseini Foundation. He says that there is an influx of millions of Afghan families returning home since the fall of the Taliban.

"In its heyday Afghanistan was one of poorest nations in the world," Hosseini says. "Many of these families have to get by with the help of neighbors. Very Steinbeckian. Families with belongings on their backs, looking for a place to settle, trying to find a home. Those things still echo like the Joad family."

Another echo of the Joad family harkens back to Bruce Springsteen, who wrote a song called "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

"I'm a big admirer of Bruce Springsteen," Hosseini says. "He was the first great American artist I knew. Born in the USA was the first LP I ever bought. I was so moved [by its stories of] people who live in the margins of darkness on the edge of town. It spoke to me so much as a young man. To be the recipient of an award people saw fit to bestow on Springsteen is really a great honor."

Khaled Hosseini will be presented with the Steinbeck Award 7:30pm Wednesday, Sept. 10, at San Jose State University's Student Union. Tickets are $25/general, $10/student. www.union.sjsu.edu.