Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia. A lecturer in literature at FAMU, the Prague film academy, in the 1950s and 1960s he wrote three poetry collections and three plays before his first novel, The Joke (1967), brought him international acclaim after it was banned in Czechoslovakia following the 1968 Soviet invasion. Kundera emigrated to France in 1975, where he lived for the rest of his life, writing novels and essays in Czech and French. Among other honors, he was a recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, and the Franz Kafka Prize, and in 1983 astronomers at the Klet' Observatory named an asteroid after him.