SOURCE: ASPENTIMES

Jamil Jan Kochai was named winner of the $35,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize Wednesday evening in New York City for “The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories,” a powerful short-story collection “about Afghans, Afghan-Americans, and the surreal, violent aftershocks of state violence.”

He began the book in 2016 as the American war in Afghanistan was approaching its 15th year. He had seen and heard the devastating effects of the war on family members in Afghanistan and felt compelled to write about it. 

“My entire life, I’d grown up with my family’s stories about this small village in Logar, Afghanistan. Many of these stories were joyous and beautiful, but just as often they were immensely violent …. There was almost no written record of the occurrence of these historical massacres, especially in English,” Kochai said.