Author Milan Kundera has Czech citizenship restored after 40 years

Milan Kundera fled Communist Czechoslovakia and has lived in France since 1975

Milan Kundera. | File

Milan Kundera, the Czech-born author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being has been given back the citizenship of his homeland that he lost 40 years ago.

The Czech ambassador to France, Petr Drulak, told Czech public television he handed Kundera his citizenship certificate last week in his Paris apartment.

It’s a result of Kundera’s meeting with Prime Minister Andrej Babis in Paris last year.

Mr. Kundera fled Communist Czechoslovakia and has lived in France since 1975, and it is there that he published his most famous books, including

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting , The Art of the Novel and Immortality . His later works, written in French, were not translated into Czech.

The 90-year-old lives in virtual seclusion, only travels to his homeland incognito and never speaks to reporters.