«To sit with a dog on a hillside, on a glorious afternoon, is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.»

Milan Kundera*

* (Brno, Czechoslovakia 1-Apr-1929)
Of Czech origin, he has lived in exile in France since 1975, having become a naturalised citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores.
His books were banned by the Communist regimes of Czechoslovakia until the downfall of the regime in the Velvet Revolution of 1989. A perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, he has been nominated on several occasions.