While many of his countrymen would indeed dispute Milan Kundera’s Czechness – the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being became a French citizen in 1981 – he is the Czech Republic’s only entry among a new ranking of the world’s Top 100 Thought Leaders that was published this week.
The list, compiled by The Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute (GDI), The WorldPost, and researcher Peter Gloor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is said to reflect the “most important pacemakers of the global conversation” and includes Pope Francis (#1) and Bono (#59) among a number of other innovators and artists.
Economist Tomáš Sedláček made the German list/Image: Facebook
Kundera, whose latest novel The Festival of Insignificance was released to mixed reviews this summer was ranked number 84 globally.
Standings were calculated using an analysis of the individual’s prominence in the English-speaking media, the blogosphere, the Twittersphere and Wikipediasphere.
Separate lists were compiled for the German-, Spanish- and Chinese-speaking areas of the world with the resulting four lists covering nearly 400 of today’s most prolific thinkers, providing their rankings and the most important information about them.
Another influential Czech, economist Tomáš Sedláček, a former advisor to president Václav Havel, placed number 88 on the German-language Thought Leaders list.