Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera has died at the age of 94, according to a Czech Television report of July 12. The award-winning author was renowned for novels delving into the thoughts, feelings and beliefs of the individual, as well as sex and relationships.
In his masterpiece ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ Kundera told the story of a love triangle against the backdrop of the Prague Spring. The epic turned Kundera into an international literary star when it was published in 1984.
By then, the dissident Czech novelist had been living in exile in Paris for almost a decade. His books had been banned in Czechoslovakia, and after the Soviet-backed government deprived him of citizenship in 1978, he remained the country’s most famous exiled writer.
After the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the creation of the Czech Republic, the writer never returned to live in his homeland. “There is no such dream of a return,” he once said in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit. “I took my Prague with me; the smell, the taste, the language, the landscape, the culture.” Kundera’s novels started being published in the Czech language from the 1990s, but “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” was not released in his native land until 2006.
