Milan Kundera (ˈmɪlan ˈkundɛra) (born April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia) is a Czech-born writer who has lived in exile in France since 1975, and became a French citizen in 1981. He has written books in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these are, therefore, not considered translations but original works. Until the mid-1990s, his work was not published in his native country. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.