1941 – 2014

The poet’s early and student years

Tomaž Šalamun was born in 1941 in Zagreb. He lived in Ljubljana, finished high school in Koper, and in 1965 completed his studies in history and art history in Ljubljana. During his studies, he collaborated with the Slovenian art group OHO, which brought together artists, writers, and other creative people, and performed throughout the former Yugoslavia. Tomaž exhibited with them in Ljubljana, Belgrade, Zagreb, and New York, and independently in Kranj. In 1969, he did an internship at the Modern Gallery Ljubljana, and in 1971 started working as an art history assistant at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana.

Career in poetry

During his career, he published around 50 collections of poetry and received many awards and recognitions for his work, including the Prešeren Award in 1999. Tomaž turned his life into constant poetry and literally flooded the consciousness of life not only in Slovenia but also in the wider world, especially in American circles.

America was especially important to him

Tomaž Šalamun adored the picturesqueness of life and included family circumstances and environments from his native Koper, specific names from his study days, and many intimate and fleeting encounters with fellow citizens and phenomena in his poems. America was especially important to Tomaž, with all its natural and cultural traditions, including Mexican ones. He met his wife, the painter Metka Krašovec, at a Mexican pyramid. Immersed in the riches of the world with all his senses, Tomaž became synonymous with a modern, extremely lucid, and free style of writing, and at the same time, an all-round successful creator.

Ambassador of poetry, Slovenian cultural attaché in America, and the most translated Slovenian poet

In 1970, Tomaž participated in the high-profile Information exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Shortly afterward, he received an invitation to the University of Iowa, where he worked in the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory. He worked in the US several more times at the invitation of Yaddo, the American art colony. More than half of his poetry collections were written in the US, and Tomaž quickly won the favor of American readers, which adopted him as their own and cited him alongside their best poets. He has visited various American universities, such as Vermont College, Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and Columbia University, among others. Between 1996 and 2000, Tomaž was the cultural attaché of Slovenia in New York, and in 2008 he worked as a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Richmond in Virginia. 
Tomaž Šalamun died in 2014 in Ljubljana at the age of 73.