Writer Milan Kundera dies at age 94

Born on April 1, 1929 in Brno, Czech Republic, Milan Kundera was exposed to art early on, through his father - a famous pianist, before turning to writing and becoming a lecturer in World Literature at the Prague Film Academy in 1952.

Writer Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023)

His literary fame came from his poems and plays. After various political changes, he moved to France in 1975 and lived there.

The first novel, Žert (roughly translated: Joke) published in 1967, was inspired by historical upheavals in the Czech Republic and was a great success.

He worked in small-town taverns as a jazz trumpeter, and eventually found artistic freedom.

In 1984, his best and most famous novel , The Unbearable Lightness of Being , was published, affirming the international status of a great writer. Then came works such as Immortality (1988), Slowness (1995), Identity (1998) and L'Ignorance (2000), which were also philosophical, talking about nostalgia, memories and homesickness.

In 2019, after 40 years of living abroad, Kundera and his wife Vera's Czech citizenship was finally restored. Petr Drulák, the Czech ambassador to France, called it "a very important symbolic gesture by the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic".

Over the years he has won many different awards, large and small, as well as becoming one of the authors predicted by many to be the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Milan Kundera's works released in Vietnam

Salman Rushdie – British author of outstanding novels, commented on Kundera as "one of the great writers who left indelible marks on the imagination of readers".

In Vietnam, many of his works have been translated and published in Vietnamese two decades ago. Being a picky person, Kundera has been very selective in selecting translators; to date, only writer Nguyen Ngoc, translator Trinh Y Thu and critic Pham Xuan Nguyen (pen name Ngan Xuyen) have been allowed to translate his works.

Milan Kundera's books when published are also required to have no introduction on the back cover, no praise or biography on the cover.

Source link: https://thanhnien.vn/nha-van-milan-kundera-qua-doi-o-tuoi-94-185230712211245263.htm