The great author and his home country, about which he wrote his most widely-known books, have not always gotten along since he fled the Communist regime in 1975 and didn’t return after it fell. (The latest flare-up happened earlier this year.) But now the 91-year-old Kundera has been awarded the Franz Kafka Prize, one of the Republic’s highest honors for writers, and he has “joyfully” accepted. – The Guardian