Boris Furlan (10 November 1894 – 10 June 1957)[1][2][Note 1] was a Slovenian jurist, philosopher of law, translator and liberal politician.
As a teenager, he attended an intensive English course at the local Berlitz language school, where he was a pupil of the Irish novelist James Joyce.
[citation needed] In late March 1941, when Yugoslavia signed the Tripartite Pact, Furlan was evacuated from the country with the help of the British intelligence service with which he had established a collaboration.
Together with the liberal conservative Slovenian émigré politicians Izidor Cankar and Franc Snoj, Furlan propagated for the Yugoslav and Slovene cause.
[citation needed] In 1943, he moved to London, where he served as Minister of Education in the exile government of Miloš Trifunović between June and August 1943.
He tried to maintain a critical attitude towards the Communist regime; among other things, he secretly translated George Orwell's Animal Farm.
[citation needed] In 1952, he moved to the small Upper Carniolan town of Radovljica to escape the daily intimidations to which he was subjected in the Slovenian capital.
[3][17] In 1998, the Slovenian writer Drago Jančar wrote a short story about Furlan, titled "Joyce's Pupil".