After 40 years, Milan Kundera is a Czech citizen once again.
The legendary author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Joke, who had his Czech citizenship stripped in 1979 because of his reformist political views, received a new citizenship certificate last week, the Associated Press reports.
He was given the certificate by Petr Drulák, the Czech ambassador to France, the country where the author has lived since 1975.
Kundera was a controversial political figure in his homeland for several years, starting in the 1950s, when he was expelled from Czechoslovakia’s ruling Communist Party. He was later re-admitted, but then expelled again, and ended up moving to France, where he wrote many of his best-known novels.
Drulák praised Kundera as “the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic,” the Guardian reports.
“[Kundera] was in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you,” Drulák said of his meeting with the 90-year-old novelist.
The restoration of Kundera’s citizenship comes just over a year after Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš offered the author the chance to become a citizen again. Babiš said that Kundera didn’t commit to the idea one way or another, but did say that he hoped it wouldn’t involve “too much paperwork.”
Kundera is the author of 10 novels, the most recent of which, The Festival of Insignificance, was published in the U.S. in 2015.
Michael Schaub is an Austin, Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
