Milan Kundera the Czech writer and one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century has died. He died in Paris on Tuesday, according to the Moravian Library in Brno after a prolonged illness. He was 94.

“Milan Kundera, a Czech-French author who is among the world’s most translated authors, died on July 11, 2023 in his Paris apartment,” the library, a state-funded research organization, said in a statement.

The author of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and other bestselling novels such as “The Joke”, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” and “Immortality” spent most of his adult  life in exile in Paris – after his Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979 – where he lived as a recluse, rarely engaging with the public.

Kundera famously left his homeland in 1975 after earlier being expelled from the Communist party for “anti-communist activities” and spent 40 years living in exile.

Born in April 1929 in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Kundera was part of an influential generation of Czech writers, film makers and intellectuals who came of age during the turbulent post-World War II years

He was known for his witty, tragicomic tales, which were often intertwined with deep philosophical debates and satirical portrayals of life under communist oppression.

Kundera’s popularity aside and a writer in much demand in academic circles across the globe his life was itself an irony. An unapologetic Communist, who was a staunch believer in its ideology in his own country, he fell out with the Communist Party in power at the time after getting disillusioned with the government.

He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1950 for criticizing the regime and was readmitted into the party a few years later.

As a successful writer and a sought-after academic, he became an influential critical voice within the party during the period of liberalization in the late 1960s that became known as the Prague Spring. It was during this era that his first novel, “The Joke,” was published.

That book – a deeply satirical look at revenge set in the totalitarian country – became a bestseller at home and around the world. And it was this book, and Kundera’s activities during the Prague Spring, that later cost him nearly everything he held dear.

In August 1968, a Soviet invasion abruptly ended the dream of a more democratic version of socialism. By the early 1970s, Kundera’s books were banned and removed from libraries. He lost his teaching job and was barred from publishing.

He was declared an enemy of the regime and was relentlessly harassed by the communist police. His phone was tapped, his life disrupted. Eventually, the regime succeeded. Kundera was forced to emigrate and was stripped of his Czechoslovak citizenship.

Kundera spent the rest of his life in exile in Paris, becoming a French citizen in 1981. It was in Paris that his literary career truly blossomed, with the publication of his three most acclaimed works, “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,” “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality.”

A believer in the power of the novel, a genre he said should be recognized as its own art form, Kundera gradually became more and more protective of his work.

He scrutinized translations of his work and banned all adaptation of his books following the 1988 film based on “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” Kundera served as a consultant on the movie, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, but later said the picture had little in common with the spirit of the book.

Kundera was often quoted as saying “An author, once quoted by a journalist, is no longer master of his word … And this, of course, is unacceptable.” He made that statement after expressing his dissatisfaction with Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation of his novel, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, which starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, even though it ensured Kundera’s ascension into the literary stratosphere.

However, the author was never satisfied with Kaufman’s simplifications of the novel’s multilayered structure. He became increasingly mistrustful of the mediia.

Speaking to his friend American writer Philip Roth in 1980 in the New York Times, Kundera lamented that he felt “the novel has no place” in the world, saying “the totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions”.

He continued: “It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.”

“Immortality” was the last novel he wrote in his native Czech language before switching to French – a move that underlined Kundera’s complicated relationship with his homeland following his exile.

He returned rarely and when he did, he traveled incognito, booking into hotels under a pseudonym. While his Czech citizenship was restored in 2019, he was by then a French author whose home was in France.

Kundera always rejected the idea that his work was inspired by his own life experiences, a claim that was heavily scrutinized in 2008 when the Czech weekly newspaper Respekt published an article accusing the acclaimed author of acting as a communist police informant in 1950.

Based on an investigation by the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, the story alleged that a police report from that year showed that Kundera, then a student dormitory leader, denounced a young ex-pilot who had defected after the communist coup and later returned as a Western agent. He was arrested and spent 14 years in labor camps.

Kundera, having spent more than two decades living in seclusion and declining to do interviews, took the unusual step of speaking up. He strongly denied the accusation, calling it “the assassination of an author.”

He was defended by many high-profile Czech and international writers, including the former Czech President and playwright Vaclav Havel.

Nonetheless, the episode left an uncomfortable question mark over the true inspiration for some of Kundera’s most acclaimed novels, many of which revolve around the themes of disillusionment, responsibility, guilt and denunciation.

However, after 40 years away, apart from brief and low-key visits to their homeland, Kundera and his wife Vera’s Czech citizenship was finally restored in 2019, a year after they met with the Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, who described the meeting as a “great honour”.

A year later, Petr Drulák, the Czech Republic’s ambassador to France, delivered Kundera’s citizenship certificate, describing it as “a very important symbolic gesture, a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic.” He said Kundera was “in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you.”

*With additional reports from the CNN and the Guardian.