1. Boris Pahor's success was not immediate; openly expressing his disapproval of communism in Yugoslavia, he was not acknowledged and was probably intentionally not recognized by his homeland until after Slovenia had gained its independence in 1991.
Boris Pahor was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government and the Cross of Honour for Science and Art by the Austrian government, and was nominated for the Nobel prize for literature by the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Boris Pahor refused the title of honorary citizen of the capital of Slovenia because he believed that the Slovene minority in Italy was not supported the way it ought to have been during the period of Fascist Italianization by right-wing or left-wing Slovenian political elites.
Boris Pahor was married to the author Radoslava Premrl and wrote a book dedicated to her at the age of 99.
Boris Pahor was born on 26 August 1913 into a Slovene minority community in Trieste, the main port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the capital of the Austrian Littoral region at the time.
Boris Pahor's father Franc was born in Kostanjevica na Krasu, a settlement that was severely ravaged by the Battles of the Isonzo during the First World War.
Boris Pahor later wrote about this childhood memory in one of his later novels, Trg Oberdan, named after the square on which the Slovene Community Hall stood, and in essays.
Boris Pahor enrolled in an Italian-language Catholic seminary in Koper, and graduated in 1935.
Boris Pahor then went to Gorizia to study theology, leaving in 1938.
In 1940, Boris Pahor was drafted into the Italian army and sent to fight in Libya.
Between April 1945 and December 1946, Boris Pahor recovered at a French sanatorium in Villers-sur-Marne, Ile-de-France.
Boris Pahor returned to Trieste at the end of 1946 when the area was under Allied military administration.
In 1951 and 1952, Boris Pahor defended Kocbek's literary work against the organized attacks launched by the Slovenian communist establishment and its allies in the Free Territory of Trieste.
Boris Pahor grew closer to Liberal Democratic positions and in 1966, together with fellow writer from Trieste Alojz Rebula, he founded the journal Zaliv, in which he sought to defend "traditional democratic pluralism" against the totalitarian cultural policies of communist Yugoslavia.
Boris Pahor discontinued the journal in 1990, after the victory of the Democratic Opposition of Slovenia in the first free elections in Slovenia after World War II.
Between 1953 and 1975, Boris Pahor worked as an Italian literature instructor in a Slovene-language high school in Trieste.
In 1969, Boris Pahor was one of the co-founders of the political party Slovene Left, established to represent all Slovene leftist voters in Italy who did not agree with the strategy adopted by the Slovene Titoist groups after 1962 of participating in the mainstream Italian political parties.
Boris Pahor publicly supported the Slovene Union on several occasions, and ran on its tickets for general and local elections.
Boris Pahor, who lived in Italy and was an Italian citizen, was banned from entering Yugoslavia for several years.
Boris Pahor was able to enter Yugoslavia only in 1981 when he was allowed to attend Kocbek's funeral.
Boris Pahor was awarded the Preseren Award, the highest recognition for cultural achievements in Slovenia, in 1992.
In May 2009, Boris Pahor became a full member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
However, the proposal stalled at the commission for awards of the City Municipality of Ljubljana, who decided not to forward the proposal to the Ljubljana city council for a vote since Boris Pahor publicly refused the idea because the Slovene minority in Italy was not supported the way it should be during the period of Fascist Italianization, neither by right-wing or by left-wing Slovenian political elites in Ljubljana.
In 2008, Boris Pahor was interviewed for the first time by RAI.
In 2009, Boris Pahor refused to accept an award by the mayor of Trieste Roberto Dipiazza because the mayor did not mention Italian Fascism alongside Nazism and communism, causing a controversy on the political right in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, resonating in the Italian media.
However, support of Boris Pahor's decision was voiced by renowned Italian left-wing intellectuals, including the astrophysicist and popular science writer Margherita Hack and the Trieste-based Association of Free and Equal Citizens, offering an alternative award that would explicitly mention anti-Fascism.
In 2007, Boris Pahor received the French National Order of the Legion of Honour from the French government.
In 2009, Boris Pahor was awarded the Cross of Honour for Science and Art by the Austrian government.
Boris Pahor was awarded with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic of Italy.
Boris Pahor was buried in the local Trieste cemetery a week later in June 2022.
In 2010, a theatre adaptation of Pahor's novel Necropolis, directed by the Trieste Slovene director Boris Kobal, was staged in Trieste's Teatro Verdi, sponsored by the mayors of Trieste and Ljubljana, respectively Roberto Dipiazza and Zoran Jankovic.
Boris Pahor was known for his lifelong defence of ethnic identity as the primary social identification.
Boris Pahor defined himself as a "Social Democrat in the Scandinavian sense of the word".
In December 2010, Boris Pahor criticized the election of Peter Bossman as the mayor of Piran on the basis of his ethnicity.
The book review reproached Boris Pahor for making personal observations about the period of Yugoslav occupation of Trieste, implying that he witnessed the events, although he did not reside in the city at the time.