Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was a Czech-born French novelist, poet, and essayist whose fiction examined love, identity, political power, and the uncertainties of modern life. His internationally known works include *The Joke*, *The Book of Laughter and Forgetting*, and *The Unbearable Lightness of Being*. Born in Brno in 1929, he moved to France in 1975 and wrote his later books in French; he died in Paris in 2023.