Czech-born writer Milan Kundera has died, public broadcaster Czech Television reported on Wednesday. He was 94.

A novelist, playwright, poet and essayist, he became the most important Czech writer in the second half of the 20th century, reaching out to the whole world.

He left Czechoslovakia in 1975. Kundera and his wife had gone to France for what was supposed to be a short stint at a university, and they did not go back. The communist government revoked Kundera’s citizenship in 1979, and since then he has scarcely returned to his homeland, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

Czechoslovak authorities banned Kundera’s books and revoked his citizenship after the 1979 publishing in France of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. In that book, Kundera calls then-Czechoslovak President Gustav Husak “the president of forgetting.”

He is best known for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which became an international bestseller when it was published in 1984. The story of a couple, Tomas and Tereza, takes place amidst the Soviet crackdown and the Prague Spring of 1968. Four years after the book’s publication, the story was adapted for an American-made film.

source praguemorning.cz