Milan Kundera

Kundera taught at Prague's film school, where his students included Miloš Forman, until the Soviet invasion of 1968 cost him his job and, soon after, his party membership for the second time. He emigrated to France in 1975 and was stripped of Czechoslovak citizenship four years later, a rupture he answered by writing with increasing irony about exile, memory, and the impossibility of ever going home.

Later in his career he began writing directly in French rather than Czech, and grew famously private, refusing interviews and photographs for decades. A 2008 magazine investigation accused him of having informed on a Western agent to the secret police in his twenties, a charge he denied and that was never conclusively proven. He died in Paris in 2023, having reclaimed Czech citizenship only a few years earlier.