Paris - Eleven world-renowned writers, including four Nobel Prize winners, have issued a ringing defence of Czech-born author Milan Kundera, accused of turning a Western spy in to the Communist state police in 1950, the daily Le Monde reported on Tuesday.

"This amounts to no more and no less than tarnishing the honour of one of the greatest living novelists on the most dubious grounds, to say the least," read a joint statement issued by the writers, including Nobel laureates JM Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine Gordimer and Orhan Pamuk.

The signatories pointed out that, in addition to Kundera's denials, the testimony of a "respected scientist from Prague," Zdenek Pesat, has also cleared him.

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.