Milan Kundera

Publishing The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in France in 1979 cost Milan Kundera his Czechoslovak citizenship. The authorities under Gustáv Husák, whom the book calls the president of forgetting, took it away; Kundera had already left Prague in 1975 for a teaching post at Rennes and never returned to live there, becoming a French citizen in 1981. Czech citizenship was given back to him only in 2019. Born in Brno on 1 April 1929 to the pianist and musicologist Ludvík Kundera, he wrote the book in Czech as seven loosely joined parts held together by theme rather than plot, circling a widow named Tamina who is trying to recover the letters and notebooks she left behind in Prague. Michael Henry Heim made the first English translation in 1980, working from the Czech; Aaron Asher produced a second in 1996 from the French text, commissioned and overseen by Kundera himself. He died in Paris on 11 July 2023, aged 94.