Milan Kundera nació en Brno (República Checa) en 1929 y desde 1975 vivió en Francia, donde murió en 2023. En su lengua materna escribió, en estricto orden de escritura, el volumen de cuentos
El libro de los amores ridículos y las novelas
La broma, La vida está en otra parte, El vals del adiós (La despedida), El libro de la risa y el olvido, La insoportable levedad del ser y
La inmortalidad. Ya en francés, las novelas
La lentitud, La identidad, La ignorancia, La fiesta de la insignificancia; la obra de teatro en tres actos
Jacques y su amo. Homenaje a Denis Diderot; y cuatro ensayos: El arte de la novela, Los testamentos traicionados, El telón y
Un encuentro. Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. He is the author of the novels
The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and
Immortality, and of the short-story collection
Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels,
Slowness, Identity and
Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works
The Art of the Novel and
Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.