Milan Kundera, a famous French writer who was born in the Czech Republic, died in Paris at the age of 94, Czech media reported.

On July 12, a representative for Kundera’s French publisher, Gallimard, said that he had died “after a long illness.”

Anna Mrazova, a spokesperson for the Moravian Library, which will have Kundera’s full archive after he gave it to the library in 2020, said, “It’s a great loss.”

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, Kundera was sent into exile in France in 1975 because he was a political rebel. Over time, he made French his main language.

The late author was known for his two famous Czech-language fiction books, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). These books were about exile, memory, and the difficulties of love and compassion in the 1960s and 1970s Czechoslovakia when politics were very unstable.

Milan was also famous around the world after the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being came out. In 1988, Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin starred in a movie based on the book.

It’s important to note that the movie was nominated for two Oscars and won a BAFTA for a best-adapted script for Philip Kaufman.

Milan left the public eye, saying that he had “taken too much of himself” and was looking for “a miracle cream that would make me invisible.”

Milan was asked to an international conference in 2009 because of the books he had written. In a letter, he refused, calling the event a “necrophile party.”