Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Moravia, Czechoslovakia on April 1, 1929 to a well-known concert pianist and musicologist, Ludvík Kundera. After studying music throughout his childhood, Kundera began to write. He accepted a position to teach at Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts in Prague in 1952. Though he participated in the Prague Spring, he was pressured into exile by the authorities following the Warsaw Pact Invasion. He emigrated to France in 1975, where he taught at the University of Rennes, before having his Czech citizenship revoked in the late 1970s.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1981.

Václav Havel was a Czech writer, philosopher, political dissident, and politician. He gained notoriety as a playwright in the early 1960s with his works The Garden Party and Memorandum, which critiqued the communist, totalitarian system through absurdist humor. These plays were performed in small, private venues, such as coffee shops and homes. They were, however, disseminated during the Prague Spring of ’68,  for which Havel was blacklisted following the Warsaw Pact Invasion.  While blacklisted, he co-authored Charter 77, and served as one of its lead signatories. This particular activity garnered the attention of state authorities, and Havel was placed under government surveillance and, eventually, house arrest. He would spend four years in prison, from 1979-1983. Upon release, Havel founded a political party, Civic Forum, which played a fundamental role in the Velvet Revolution. Havel himself participated in the roundtable talks between and the society and the regime that resulted in the peaceful transition of power. Havel would serve as the first President of Czechoslovakia, and the first President of the Czech Republic after the Velvet Divorce.

Havel, Václav. The Garden Party and Other Plays. Translated by Vera Blackwell, George Theiner, Jan Novák, Grove Press, 1993.

Iva Pekárková was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1963, where she later studied microbiology and virology at Charles University. She began writing fiction while at university. In 1985, she immigrated to the United States via a Austrian refugee camp. She spent the next ten years writing fiction in New York City. Her works consider life and normative sexuality under the communist, totalitarian regime.

For more information, read  Vĕra Eliášová, Simona Fojtová, and Iva Pekárková, “An Interview with Iva Pekárková,” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 2 (2006): 155-69. 

Pekárková, Iva. Truck Stop Rainbows. Translated by David Powelstock, Vintage, 1994.