The Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera died on Tuesday July 11 at the age of 94, the spokesperson for the Milan Kundera Library announced on Wednesday in his hometown of Brno. “Unfortunately, I can confirm that Milan Kundera died yesterday (Tuesday) after a long illness,” Anna Mrazova told AFP.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, the author became French in 1981.
A former communist, the freethinker Kundera gradually fell out with the Czechoslovak authorities and decided to live in exile after the crushing of the Prague Spring reform movement by armies led by the Soviet Union in 1968.
Czech writer the best known in the world, Kundera was paradoxically also for many years the least known world writer in his country with regard to his works published in France.
Abandoning his native language to write in that of his adopted country, the novelist did not authorize, for the sake of perfectionism according to him, the translation into Czech of his works such as “The slowness”, “The identity”, “Ignorance” or “The Feast of Insignificance”.