Milan Kundera

The son of a concert pianist and a musicologist, Milan Kundera participated in the liberalizing reforms that culminated in 1968’s Prague Spring. After Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček was removed by Soviet bloc troops, Kundera was cast out of the party. In 1975 the Czechoslovak government allowed Kundera and his wife to immigrate to France; four years later he was stripped of his citizenship. His best-known work, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in France in 1984; it remained banned in Czechoslovakia until 1989. His recent novels have all been written in French.