Milan Kundera, author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, dies aged 94

Milan Kundera, 1 of the biggest names successful European lit successful caller decades, has died successful Paris aged 94.

His best-known enactment was his 1984 caller The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Anna Mrazova, a spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library successful his location metropolis of Brno successful the Czech Republic, said helium had died aft a agelong illness.

He was a towering fig successful Czech lit but his scathing disapproval of Czechoslovakia's communist authorities saw him fly for France successful 1975.

A poetic and satirical author, Kundera's novels won praise for their reflection of some authorities and mundane life.

Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said his enactment reached "whole generations of readers crossed each continents and achieved planetary fame".

"He leaves down not lone notable fiction, but besides important effort work."

Born successful 1929 into an elite Czech family, his begetter was a soft teacher and a pupil of the composer Janacek, and ensured Kundera received philharmonic grooming astatine an precocious level.

Kundera studied successful Prague, becoming a lecturer successful satellite literature. He joined the ruling Communist Party and initially helium was an ardent member.

But his penning soon got him into governmental trouble. His archetypal caller The Joke - a achromatic drama published successful 1967 - led to a prohibition connected his penning successful Czechoslovakia.

In 1970 helium was asked to permission the enactment aft expressing enactment for the Prague Spring movement, the play of governmental liberalisation crushed by the 1968 Soviet invasion.

Kundera's activism led to his dismissal from his teaching station and his novels were removed from nationalist libraries, portion the merchantability of his enactment was banned until the autumn of the Communist authorities successful 1989.

For a abbreviated clip helium performed arsenic jazz trumpeter, earlier emigrating to France successful 1975 with his woman Vera, settling archetypal successful Rennes past Paris. He became a naturalised French national successful 1981, 2 years aft helium was stripped of his Czech nationality, and yet wrote successful French.

He soon secured a estimation arsenic a ground-breaking writer with The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which told the communicative of 4 Czech artists and intellectuals and a canine caught up successful the little play of betterment that ended erstwhile Soviet tanks rolled into Prague.

The publication was adapted for the surface successful 1987, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis. But Kundera expressed dissatisfaction with the movie and with what helium perceived arsenic a deficiency of acceptance of the caller successful the modern world.

"It seems to maine that each implicit the satellite radical nowadays similar to justice alternatively than to understand, to reply alternatively than to ask," helium told his person and writer Philip Roth successful the New York Times.

"So that the dependable of the caller tin hardly beryllium heard implicit the noisy foolishness of quality certainties."

It was yet translated into Czech and became a bestseller successful his homeland successful 2006.

His 1979 enactment The Book of Laughter and Forgetting spanned 7 narratives and containing elements of the magic realism genre, portion successful 1988 helium wrote 1 of his champion novels, Immortality.

In 1985 helium received the Jerusalem Prize - a prize fixed to writers writers whose works person dealt with themes of quality state successful society.

And portion helium was a predominant contender for the Nobel Prize for literature, the grant remained elusive.

In 2008 helium was beset with much governmental occupation erstwhile helium was accused of betraying a Czech airman moving for US intelligence.

He issued an unprecedented and heated denial to Czech quality bureau CTK, prompting an unfastened missive of enactment from chap writers including JM Coetzee and Salman Rushdie.

It was not until 2019 that helium and his woman had their Czech citizenship restored by Prime Minister Andrej Babis, 40 years aft they had it revoked.

Milan Kundera was lauded for having a distinctive voice, though helium was sometimes criticised for his portrayal of women and preoccupation with the antheral gaze.

His last caller successful 2014, The Festival of Insignificance, primitively published successful Italian, received mixed views, with immoderate describing it arsenic a "battle betwixt anticipation and boredom".