Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was born on April 1st 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. He wrote his first poems during his high school years. After World War II he worked as a jazz musician before going to college. He studied music, film and literature at university in Prague. He moved on to become a professor at the film faculty of the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. He also published poems, essays and stage plays. In the same period of time he joined the editorial staff at the literature magazines "Literarni noviny" and "Listy". Kundera joined the Communist Party in 1948, as many other Czech intellectuals did at that time. In 1950 he got expelled from the Party because of "individualistic tendencies". After graduation in 1952 he was appointed lecturer in world literature at the Film Academy. He joined the Communist Party once again and stayed on from 1956 to 1970. In 1953 he published his first book of poems. Kundera got known after collections of poems through his three volumes "Laughable Loves", written and published between 1958 and 1968. In his first novel, "The Joke" from 1967, he dealt with Stalinism. After the Soviet invasion in the spring of 1968 Kundera lost his permission to teach and his books were removed from all public libraries in the country. Kundera moved to France and became a guest professor at the University of Rennes in 1975. In 1979 he was deprived of his Czechoslovakian citizenship by the government as a reaction to his "Book of Laughter and Forgetting". The following novels were not allowed to be published in Czechoslovakia. Since 1981 he is a French citizen. During his years in France he has also written material in French. He resides in Paris with his wife, Vera Hrabankova.