Milan Kundera responded to the announcement of her award by telephone from Paris, where he lives. He said that he gladly accepted it and felt honored, especially because it was the “Kafka’s” award, the “fellow writer’s” award, a writer above others close to him.
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Ninety-one-year-old Kundera is one of the most important modern Czech authors. His first novel in 1967 was A Joke. After publishing the Book of Laughter and Oblivion in 1979, in which he described the then Czechoslovak President Gustav Husák as the “President of Oblivion”, he was deprived of Czechoslovak citizenship by the communist regime.
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He has lived in France since the mid-1970s and has had French citizenship since 1981. Last year, he regained Czech citizenship. Recently, his last novel, The Celebration of Insignificance, was published in Czech.
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The first winner of the award was the American writer Philip Roth in 2001. In the following years, it was acquired, among others, by Elfriede Jelinek, Haruki Murakami, Arnošt Lustig, Peter Handke, Václav Havel, Amos Oz, Margaret Atwoodová and others. Last year, the award went to the French writer Pierre Michon.
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The award ceremony takes place in the representative premises of the Old Town Hall in Prague, always at the end of October, on the occasion of the national holiday of the Czech Republic.
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