Milan Kundera wins the Kafka Award for the first time
On September 20th local time, Vladimír Železný (Vladimír Železný), president of the Kafka Association, announced that the Czech writer Milan Kundera had won this year's Kafka Prize.
Milan Kundera now lives in Paris, and he responded to the news of his award by phone.
He happily accepted the award and expressed his honour for it.
Especially because this is the Kafka Award, Kafka is a better writer than the other writers around him.
Kundera, 91 years old, was born in the Czech Republic. He has been living in France since 1975. He will be the 20th winner of this international literary prize for contemporary writers.
Zelezny said that the jury admired Kundera's life's work very much. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages, making an extraordinary contribution to Czech culture.
Kundera has been writing in French since the 1990s.
Past winners of the Franz Kafka Award include Philip Roth, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter, Haruki Murakami (Haruki Murakami), Yves Bonnefoy (Yves Bonnefoy), Peter Handke (Peter Handke) and Margaret Atwood (Margaret Atwood).
Zelezny said that the Kafka Association decided to submit Kundera's nomination to the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Kundera not only wrote masterpieces such as "Joke" (1967) during his ex-Czechoslovak period, he also contributed classic works such as "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" (1984) and "Immortality" (1990) during the immigration period. .
After his work was banned by Czechoslovakia, he published the novel "Laughing Forgetful Books" (1978).
Two years later, he acquired French citizenship.
In 2019, Kundera also obtained Czech citizenship.
Earlier this month, his latest novel "Celebrating Meaninglessness" (2013) was published in Czech translation and it was his first French book translated into his native language.
Compiled by The Paper by Cheng Qianqian