Milan Kundera

Kundera was born to middle-class parents, Milada Kunderová and Ludvik Kundera, in Brno, a large city in Czechoslovakia, known today as Czechia. Kundera’s father was a noted Czech pianist and musicologist, and he taught Kundera piano and musical composition, an influence that is reflected throughout much of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. As a teenager, Kundera began to write poetry, and it was during this time that he officially joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. He graduated from high school in 1948 and moved to Prague, where he studied literature and aesthetics at Charles University. One year later, Kundera transferred to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague to study film. Despite being pro-communist, Kundera was also an outspoken supporter of communist reform, and he was expelled from the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1950 for his political views. He graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts in 1952, where he stayed on as a lecturer of literature. Kundera was readmitted to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in 1956, but his desire for reform continued, and after participating in the protests of the Prague Spring in 1968—an event that is also mentioned in The Unbearable Lightness of Being—he was again expelled from the party and dismissed from his job. He immigrated to France in 1975, and after his Czech citizenship was stripped in 1979, Kundera officially became a French citizen in 1981. Since moving to France, Kundera has lived a quiet and guarded life in Paris. He is a highly respected writer and has written numerous novels, poems, and essays, including Life is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Festival of Insignificance. Kundera has won several prizes and awards, such as the 1987 Austrian State Prize for European Literature; the 2000 Herder Prize, an international prize awarded to European writers; and the 2011 Ovid prize, an honor awarded annually to one writer from any country.