Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.
Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. He is best known for his novels, including
The Joke
(1967),
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
(1979), and
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
(1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.
