31 Facts About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores".

Milan Kundera leads a low-profile life and rarely speaks to the media.

Milan Kundera was thought to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was a nominee for other awards.

Milan Kundera was awarded the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, in 1987 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and the 2000 Herder Prize.

Milan Kundera was born in 1929 at Purkynova 6 in Kralovo Pole, a quarter of Brno, Czechoslovakia, to a middle-class family.

Milan Kundera's father, Ludvik Kundera, was an important Czech musicologist and pianist who served as the head of the Janacek Music Academy in Brno from 1948 to 1961.

Milan Kundera learned to play the piano from his father and later studied musicology and musical composition.

Milan Kundera is a cousin of Czech writer and translator Ludvik Milan Kundera.

Milan Kundera belonged to the generation of young Czechs who had had little or no experience of the pre-war democratic Czechoslovak Republic.

Milan Kundera completed his secondary school studies in Brno at Gymnazium trida Kapitana Jarose in 1948.

Milan Kundera studied literature and aesthetics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University in Prague.

Milan Kundera used the expulsion as an inspiration for the main theme of his novel Zert.

In 1956 Milan Kundera was readmitted to the Party but was expelled for the second time in 1970.

Milan Kundera taught for a few years in the University of Rennes.

Milan Kundera was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship in 1979; he has been a French citizen since 1981.

Milan Kundera maintains contact with Czech and Slovak friends in his homeland, but rarely returns and always does so without fanfare.

Milan Kundera has repeatedly insisted that he is a novelist rather than a politically motivated writer.

Milan Kundera's books have been translated into many other languages.

In 1975, Milan Kundera moved to France where The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in 1979.

Critics noted that the Czechoslovakia Milan Kundera portrays "is, thanks to the latest political redefinitions, no longer precisely there," which is the "kind of disappearance and reappearance" Milan Kundera ironically explores in the book.

Milan Kundera is more concerned with the words that shape or mold his characters than with their physical appearance.

Many of Milan Kundera's characters seem to develop as expositions of one of these themes at the expense of their full humanity.

In Sixty-three Words, a chapter in The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera tells of a Scandinavian publisher who hesitated to publish The Farewell Party because of its apparent anti-abortion message.

In 2009, Milan Kundera signed a petition in support of Polish film director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after he was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and anally raping a 13-year-old girl.

On 13 October 2008, the Czech weekly Respekt reported that an investigation was being carried out by the state-funded historical archive and research Institute for Studies of Totalitarian Regimes, into whether a young Milan Kundera had denounced a returned defector, Miroslav Dvoracek, to the StB, or Czechoslovak secret police, in 1950.

The accusation was based on a police station report which named "Milan Kundera, student, born 1.4.1929" as the informant in regard to Dvoracek's presence at a student dormitory.

The police report alleges that Militka told Dlask of Dvoracek's presence, and that Dlask told Milan Kundera, who told the secret police.

Milan Kundera was the student representative of the dorm Dvoracek had visited, and while it cannot be ruled out that another student could have denounced him to the StB using Milan Kundera's name, impersonating someone else in a Stalinist police state posed a significant risk.

Milan Kundera won The Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 1987.

The asteroid 7390 Milan Kundera, discovered at the Klet Observatory in 1983, is named in his honor.

Milan Kundera appears in the third volume of Danganronpa Togami by Yuya Sato, where he explains to the former Shinobu Togami about how Borges and the K2K System works.