Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera married Vera Hrabankova in 1967.

In 2008, a scandal erupted when the Czech weekly ‘Respekt’ publicized an investigation carried out by the Czech Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes which alleged that Kundera had denounced a young Czech pilot, Miroslav Dvořáček, to the police in 1950. Kundera denied the charges.

Milan Kundera was born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, into a middle-class family. His father, Ludvík Kundera, was a prominent musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janáček Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961. His mother’s name was Milada Kunderová.

He was trained to play the piano at an early age. He was a young boy when the World War II started, and much of his political ideology was shaped by the experiences of World War II and the German occupation. While in his teens he joined the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia only to be expelled later on.

He completed his schooling from Gymnázium třída Kapitána Jaroše in 1948 and proceeded to study literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague. He transferred to the Film Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague after a couple of terms and graduated in 1952.

In 1985, Milan Kundera received the Jerusalem Prize.

He was presented with The Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987.

He won the international Herder Prize in 2000 and the Czech State Literature Prize in 2007.

His best known work is ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’, a story about two women, two men, a dog and their lives in the Prague Spring period of Czechoslovak history in 1968. The critically acclaimed work was later adapted into an American film.

His novel ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’, composed of seven separate narratives united by some common themes speaks of Czech citizens opposing the communist regime in various ways. Wittily written with elements of irony, the book is one of the author’s most successful ones.