Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia on 1 April 1929. In 1975, he went into exile in France, where he acquired citizenship in 1981; four years before that, in 1979, the Communist Party revoked his Czechoslovak citizenship. His books were banned at home until the Velvet Revolution in 1989 finally swept the regime away. He won the Jerusalem Prize in 1985, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987, and the Herder Prize in 2000. In 2019, seventy years after he was born there, the Czech Republic restored his citizenship. He died in France on 11 July 2023, never having won the Nob…