Kundera was born in the Czech city of Brno but went into exile in France in 1975 after being ostracised for criticising the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He gained French citizenship in 1981.
Milan Kundera, Czech-born French writer, best known for his book ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ has died, announced Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman of the Moravian Library (MZK) on Wednesday. The famous writer died in Paris yesterday after suffering a long illness. He was 94.
Kundera was born in the Czech city of Brno but went into exile in France in 1975 after being ostracised for criticising the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. He gained French citizenship in 1981. Until 1989, his books were banned in then Czechoslovakia.
Kundera’s early poetic works had a staunch pro-communist approach. However, it was his novels -- which escaped ideological classification with themes and characters floating between mundane everyday life and the lofty world of ideas -- that gained global recognition.
His best-known novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, opens wrenchingly with Soviet tanks rolling through Prague, the Czech capital that was the author’s home until he moved to France in 1975.
Weaving together themes of love and exile, politics and the deeply personal, Kundera’s novel won critical acclaim, earning him a wide readership among Westerners who embraced both his anti-Soviet subversion and the eroticism threaded through many of his works.
He rarely gave interviews and was a firm believer in his work speaking louder than his words.
He was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987 and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he was honoured with the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia.