Milan Kundera

Czech novelist and essayist Born: 1st April 1929 Brno, Czechoslovakia (present day Czech Republic) Died: 11th July 2023 Paris, France. Kundera was born into a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera, was a prominent musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. His mother’s name was Milada Kunderová. Kundera is best known for his novels The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. His books are part meditation, part love story and part satire, and explore questions of history and human existence. Some of his other novels are Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, and Immortality. He has also written a short-story collection called Laughable Loves. Kundera’s works combine erotic comedy with political criticism and philosophical speculation. He studied musicology and aesthetics at Charles University in Prague. After World War II, he worked as a tradesman and a jazz musician before beginning his studies. He wrote his first poems during high school. Kundera went into exile in France in 1975. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979 but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019. He spent much of his life in seclusion, rarely engaging with the public. Son of Ludvík Kundera