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Born on April 1, 1929, in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Kundera fueled his interest in the arts by first studying piano and music composition. His early musical inclination seems logical considering that his father, Ludvik Kundera, was a concert pianist and musicologist. Ludvik Kundera had earned recognition for collaborating with famed Czech composer Leos Janacek and for serving as rector of the state conservatory in Brno. The musical influence and training left an impact on Milan. Long after he became a writer, he would describe his openly constructed novels using musical terms and analogies.

Kundera studied both music and film as a young man, all the while writing poetry. His first published works were anthologies of poetry, including Man: A Broad Garden (1953), The Last May (1955), and Monologues (1957). Despite his success with this type of writing, Kundera was never comfortable being labeled a poet. He claimed that he was actually relieved when he lost the knack for writing poetry at the end of the 1950s.

In 1952, he had been hired as a teacher of world literature on the film faculty at the Prague Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts, a post he held until 1969. Perhaps influenced by his classes on the craft of writing, he began doing literary criticism in 1960, then turned to writing plays and short stories. Finally, he began authoring his first novel, The Joke, in the mid-1960s.

At the time The Joke was written and published, Kundera served as an opposition leader in the reform movement that resulted in the Prague Spring of 1968, in which Czech artists and intellectuals led a cultural uprising denouncing governmental repression of the arts. Advocating a more liberal socialism, they supported President Alexander Dubcek, who introduced "socialism with a human face" during his brief tenure in office.

The Soviet invasion in the summer of 1968 stopped the liberal direction of Czech culture and government and shifted the country toward a repressive Soviet-dominated communism. Soon after, communist authorities banned over 400 authors for refusing to accept or cooperate with the new order, including Kundera, who continued to speak out against the ill effects of a repressive state on Czech literature and history. In 1969, his second novel, Life Is Elsewhere, was refused publication, and the following year, he was expelled from the Communist Party and the Writers Union. Access to his work was banned, and Kundera was reduced to making a living by writing an astrology column under a fictitious name.

Though refused publication in his native country, Life Is Elsewhere was published in France and the United States, winning the Prix Medicis for best foreign novel in France. Undoubtedly due to the success and acclaim of that novel, Kundera was offered a teaching post at a university in France, which he accepted. He relocated to France in 1975. He was stripped of his citizenship to Czechoslovakia in 1979.

The novels he wrote after moving to France, including The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Farewell Party, became the most well-known of his literary output, forming the basis of his reputation as a contemporary writer of modernist fiction. He rose to international prominence with the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which was turned into a film by American director Philip Kaufman in 1988, giving Kundera a wider profile among mainstream readers. He continued to produce his complex novels, including Immortality and Slowness, throughout the 1990s.

Eschewing the straightforward linear narrative, Kundera constructs his novels by putting together a series of seemingly unconnected "stories" that are nonetheless related through theme or situation. The stories are arranged specifically through chapters, subchapters, parts, or sections to suggest a sense of time or to create a mood. Often the narratives are interrupted by bits of philosophy, autobiography, or psychological conjecture. The distancing nature of his writing style has been deemed modernist, and even postmodernist, yet Kundera is quick to connect his work to the long tradition of the Central European novel.

Communism and the politics of his country are essential to his novels' content, and his gradual disillusionment with communism can be traced in the evolution of his work. However, Kundera has always resisted being labeled a dissident writer, preferring a broader description to his work that includes and embraces past traditions and philosophies.

Often described as ironic, satiric, pessimistic, and erotic, Kundera's work is difficult to capture in a brief summary, which amuses the novelist because he dislikes the Western media's penchant for reducing art to brief explanatory descriptions. Once, when asked in all seriousness by Antonin Liehm why he so often used the joke as a literary device, Kundera lightly replied that it was because he was born on April Fools Day.

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