• Czech-born writer Milan Kundera died in Paris at the age of 94.

• Kundera was a writer who reached whole generations of readers across all continents and achieved global fame.

• He is best known for the novel ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’.

• Kundera was born on April 1, 1929, in the town of Brno, in what was then Czechoslovakia. 

• His first novel, ‘The Joke’, was published in 1967 and offered a scathing portrayal of the Czechoslovak Communist regime and the party he was still a member of.

• Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the communist regime in Czechoslovakia banned his books.

• He went into exile in France in 1975, becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1981.

• Kundera’s Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979.

• ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ (1979) was a story written in seven parts that showed the power of totalitarian regimes to erase parts of history and create an alternative past.

• His most famous work, ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ (1984), centered on the Prague Spring and its aftermath.

• It was made into a film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and directed by Philip Kaufman in 1988 that earned two Academy Award nominations.

• His other works include ‘Immortality’, ‘Identity’ and ‘The Festival of Insignificance’.

• In 2019, the Czech Republic restored his nationality.

• Kundera won accolades for the way he depicted themes and characters that floated between the mundane reality of everyday life and the lofty world of ideas.

• He was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, the 1987 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.

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