Boris Pahor, a writer, journalist, and teacher of Slovenian and Italian literature, was born on 26 August 1913 in Trieste, which at that time was part of Austria-Hungary. He went to the Slovenian primary school in Trieste and continued his education at the Italian Catholic Seminary in Koper, from where he graduated in 1935. He went on to study theology, but left the programme after three years.
In 1940, he was drafted into Mussolini's army, serving as an interpreter at a camp for captured Yugoslav officers and at the same time enrolling in the Italian literature programme at the University of Padua, where he earned his PhD in 1947. After returning to Trieste in the autumn of 1943, he joined the Yugoslav Liberation Front, only to be arrested a few months later by the Slovenian Home Guard, which handed him over to the Gestapo, who sent him to a series of concentration camps. Pahor’s experience in the camps clearly marked his prose, most notably in his 1967 autobiographical novel Nekropola (Necropolis), which was reprinted several times, but only obtained wider European recognition in 1990, when it was translated into French.
From 1953 to 1975, he taught Italian literature at the Slovenian secondary school in Trieste. In 1966 he founded the magazine Zaliv (The Bay), which he published with the help of his wife, and which, until its final issue in 1990, also served as a platform for polemic articles by Slovenian dissidents. Together with Alojz Rebula, he published an interview with Edvard Kocbek n 1975. It was in this interview that Kocbek spoke for the first time about the post-war extra-judicial killings of the Home Guard members on the Kočevje Rog Plateau. Because of this Pahor was banned from entering Yugoslavia for several years. He only crossed its borders again in 1981 to attend Kocbek's funeral. Eight years later, his memories of Kocbek appeared in his book Ta ocean, strašno odprt (This Ocean, So Terribly Open), which was published in Slovenia by the Slovenian Society (Slovenska matica).
Pahor died on 30 May 2022 at his home in Contovello near Trieste, at the age of 108.
