Milan Kundera (UK: /ˈkʊndərə, ˈkʌn-/, born 1 April 1929) is a writer who was born in Czechoslovakia and writes mainly in the Czech and French languages. He is best known as the writer of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Identity. The sale of his books in his home country was forbidden until the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Kundera has lived in France since 1975.