Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was a Czech-born novelist and essayist who later became a French citizen. Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, he studied at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and went on to teach there. After the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia, his books were banned at home, and he emigrated to France in 1975. Kundera wrote in Czech before later writing in French. His internationally acclaimed novels include *The Book of Laughter and Forgetting* (1979) and *The Unbearable Lightness of Being* (1984).