"A writing and a voice that we will miss," French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne wrote on Twitter. She praised Kundera's work as "a deep, human, intimate and distant exploration at the same time."

He "died in the afternoon of Tuesday, July 11, 2023," Gallimard, his longtime French publisher, told AFP on Wednesday.

"Unfortunately, I can confirm that Mr. Milan Kundera has passed away (...) after a long illness," Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in her hometown of Brno, in what is now the Czech Republic, told AFP.

In Strasbourg, where they were meeting, MEPs observed a minute's standing silence in tribute to the writer.

Death of Czech writer Milan Kundera at 94 Aude © GENET, Sabrina BLANCHARD / AFP

A sarcastic painter of the human condition, in its political, amorous and erotic dimensions, Kundera was one of the few authors to have entered the prestigious French collection of La Pléiade during his lifetime. It has been translated into fifty languages.

Born Czechoslovakia on April 1, 1929, stripped of this nationality before becoming Czech later, he had been French since 1981.

Milan Kundera "has been able to reach generations of readers on all continents with his work and has gained worldwide fame," Prime Minister Petr Fiala said on Twitter.

Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera, October 14, 1973 in Prague © - / AFP/Archives

This defender of freedom, who began his career exposing the absurdities of the communist regime, was destined like his parents for a career as a musician. And Milan Kundera was first and foremost a music lover: his first texts, poems, are composed like sonatas.

Media silence

In the 60s, he published two novels, "La Plaisanterie", hailed in particular by the French poet Louis Aragon, and "Risibles amours", texts drawing up a bitter assessment of the political illusions of the generation of the Prague coup which, in 1948, allowed the coming to power of the communists.

Blacklisted in his country after the Prague Spring, Kundera went into exile in 1975 in France with his wife Vera, a star presenter of Czech television.

Franco-Czech writer Milan Kundera and his wife Vera, on October 14, 1973 in Prague © - / AFP/Archives

Naturalized, he will choose French, which he mastered perfectly, as the language of writing. It marked its break with a native country that stripped him of his nationality in 1979, then returned it to him in 2019.

In France, he published "La Valse aux adieux" and "Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli". Discovering that his first French translator had distorted his style, he was extremely picky about the French editions of his works.

In 1984 appeared what some consider his masterpiece, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", a romance novel and ode to freedom, both serious and casual. The book will be adapted into a film, starring Juliette Binoche and Daniel Day-Lewis.

He has refrained from speaking in the media since the mid-80s, wishing anyone to talk about his work and nothing else. Interviewed by AFP on Wednesday, Bernard Pivot remembers that his passage in 1984 in the program Apostrophes had gone "well", but that he had not heard of the writer after, like all his fellow journalists.

Milan Kundera lived discreetly in the center of Paris, with a very small circle of relatives. He was several times the victim of hoaxes announcing his death before his time.

He was regularly approached for the Nobel Prize in literature, which he never won.

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© 2023 AFP