Milan Kundera has died aged 94 following a prolonged illness. The Czech-born, French writer probed ontological questions of memory and exile in his extensive catalogue of writing, though he was perhaps best known for authoring The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
Kundera was born in 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia and studied music before turning to literature and becoming a lecturer at Prague’s film academy in 1952. Since his youth, Kundera remained politically active, joining the Communist party which he was later twice banned from, the second time in 1970 for advocating for freedom of speech and equal rights for all in the 1968 Prague Spring during which the Soviet Union invaded the country. In 1975, Kundera fled to Paris where he remained for the rest of his life, only returning to his homeland on a few occasions. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality (1990) are the writer’s most well-known works, and he remains a beloved literary figure for the profound ways in which he engaged with the very diametrics and complexities of existence.
