An Interview with Milan Kundera | Ian McEwan | Granta Magazine

Milan Kundera | Interview

Milan Kundera & Ian McEwan

Translated by Ian Patterson

‘If you are a small nation, though, you do not make history. You are always the object of history.’ Ian McEwan interviews Milan Kundera in 1984.

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 and died in 2023 in France. His novels include The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. ‘The Great Return’, published in Granta 78, is taken from his novel Ignorance.

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Ian McEwan

Ian McEwan has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times, winning the award for Amsterdam in 1998. His novel Atonement, made into a film, received the W.H. Smith Literary Award (2002), the National Book Critics' Circle Fiction Award (2003), the Los Angeles Times Prize for Fiction (2003), and the Santiago Prize for the European Novel (2004). He was chosen as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. His novel Machines Like Me was published by Vintage in 2019 and followed by the novella The Cockroach.

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Translated by Ian Patterson

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