Milan Kundera (born 1 April 1929) is a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, and became a naturalised French citizen in 1981, applying for and receiving his Czech citizenship back in 2019. 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 socialist régime in Czechoslovakia banned his books. He lives virtually incognito and rarely speaks to the media. A perpetual contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he is believed to have been nominated on several occasions.
