Milan Kundera
| Milan Kundera | |
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| Born |
1 April 1929 Brno, Czechoslovakia |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | French |
| Ethnicity | Czech |
| Citizenship | France |
| Alma mater | Charles University, Prague; Academy of Performing Arts in Prague |
| Genre | Novel |
| Notable works |
The Joke (Žert) (1967) The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) |
| Notable awards |
Jerusalem Prize 1985 The Austrian State Prize for European Literature 1987 Vilenica International Literary Festival 1992 Herder Prize 2000 Czech State Literature Prize 2007 |
| Relatives |
Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971), father Ludvík Kundera (cousin) |
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Milan Kundera (Czech: [ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra]; born 1 April 1929) is a Czech-born French writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores".
Kundera's best-known work is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Prior to the Velvet Revolution of 1989 the Communist régime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he is believed to have been nominated on several occasions.
Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkyňova ulice, 6 (6 Purkyně Street) in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera (1891–1971) was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. His mother was Milada Kunderová (born Janošíková). Milan learned to play the piano from his father; he later studied musicology and musical composition. Musicological influences and references can be found throughout his work; he has even included musical notation in the text to make a point. Kundera is a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvík Kundera. He belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic. Their ideology was greatly influenced by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation. Still in his teens, he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia which seized power in 1948. He completed his secondary school studies in Brno at Gymnázium třída Kapitána Jaroše in 1948. He studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. After two terms, he transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague where he first attended lectures in film direction and script writing.
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