Prague - Acclaimed Czech-born writer Milan Kundera turned in a Western agent as a student during the Stalinist era, leading to the man's imprisonment at a labour camp, a magazine reported Monday.

Police records show that Kundera, then a 20-year-old Prague film student, denounced a young Czech exile who was spying in his native country in 1950, the Respekt weekly said.

Kundera, who later gained fame as an anti-communist dissident and international acclaim for his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, told Czechoslovak police that a former military pilot who worked for Western intelligence after escaping to Germany was staying with a female friend at a dormitory, the report said.

Miroslav Dvoracek was arrested and sentenced to 22 years in prison. He spent nearly 14 years in jail, mostly in an infamous uranium-mining labour camp, Respekt said.

Dvoracek and the woman are dead, and the weekly said it could not establish Kundera's motives. The novelist, who has avoided the media for decades, would not comment, the report said.

Kundera, 79, is a characteristic member of his generation. A dedicated Communist during university studies in the years after the World War II, he shifted his beliefs in the mid-1950s.

He joined a drive to reform the Communist regime in 1960s and became known worldwide as a persecuted dissident writer after the Soviet-led invasion of then Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Kundera left the country in 1975 and has since lived in France. He has meticulously protected his privacy and insisted on separating his work from his life.

Most Kundera novels were banned in his native country after 1968 and several are still not available in Czech, a source of bitterness among Czech readers.

A year ago, Kundera was awarded the Czech Republic's State Prize for Literature after his most famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, was published in Czech. (dpa)