Nobel laureates defend Kundera over spy charge

Four Nobel Prize-winners for literature have joined seven other distinguished writers in issuing a statement of support for the Czech-born author Milan Kundera, who has been accused of informing for the Communist secret police when he was a student.

Kundera, 79, has fiercely denied the accusation and threatened to sue a Czech weekly which was the first to publish allegations last month that he had denounced an agent who served a 14-year jail sentence for spying. The weekly, Respekt, has refused to apologise. The 11 writers – including the Nobel laureates J M Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Pamuk – said "the honour of one of the greatest living novelists has been tarnished on dubious grounds, to say the least. We wish to express our indignation at this orchestrated campaign of calumny, and to state our solidarity with Milan Kundera".

They claimed testimony from an academic in Prague, who was not identified, had exonerated Kundera.

The other writers who signed the statement yesterday were Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, Jean Daniel, Jorge Semprun, Juan Goytisolo and Pierre Mertens.