Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (UK: , Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra] (listen); born 1 April 1929) is a Czech-born French writer. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979 and restored in 2019. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores".Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He leads a low-profile life and rarely speaks to the media. He was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was also a nominee for other awards.He was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize. In 2021, he received the Golden Order of Merit from the president of Slovenia.