Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (April 1, 1929 – July 11, 2023) was a Czech-born French writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalized French citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in bookstores". Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 the socialist régime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He lived virtually incognito and rarely spoke to the media. A perpetual contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he was believed to have been nominated several times.