His 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.

[5] He refused the title of honorary citizen of the capital of Slovenia because he believed that the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–47) 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.

[8] 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.

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.

Fascism had a traumatizing effect on young Pahor, which he remembered in an interview for Delo two months before his 100th birthday:... due to the trauma of experience of the Slovene Community Hall being burned down, which I experienced at age seven, on the spot, and following the shock that I could not go to Slovene schools anymore, I felt robbed in a way of the spiritual and psychological meaning of life.

The 1936 Fascist attack on Slovene choirmaster Lojze Bratuž—who was kidnapped, tortured, and killed on Christmas Eve because his choirs continued singing in Slovene—was later referred to by Pahor as confirming his dedication to anti-Fascism and the Slovene ethnic cause, as well as a lifelong intellectual opposition to all totalitarianisms in the name of Christian humanist and communitarian values.

In 1955, he described these crucial weeks of his life in the novel Mesto v zalivu (The City in the Bay), a story about a young Slovene intellectual from Trieste, wondering about what action to take confronted with the highly complex personal and political context of World War II on the border between Italy and Slovenia.

The concentration camp experience became the major inspiration for Pahor's work, which has been frequently compared to that of Primo Levi, Imre Kertész, or Jorge Semprún.

The two men were united in their criticism of the communist regime in Yugoslavia and established a close friendship that lasted until Kocbek's death in 1981.

In 1951 and 1952, 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.

Pahor publicly supported the Slovene Union on several occasions, and ran on its tickets for general and local elections.

In 1989, his book Ta ocean strašnó odprt (This Ocean, So Terribly Open) published in Slovenia by the Slovene Society (Slovenska matica) publishing house, was dedicated to Pahor's memories of Kocbek and marked one of the first steps towards the final rehabilitation of Kocbek's public image in post-communist Slovenia.

[1] In 2010, a documentary Trmasti spomin (The Stubborn Memory) was screened on primetime on the Slovenian National Television Broadcast, featuring several famous public figures who speak about Pahor, including a Slovene philosopher who lives and works in Paris, two Slovene historians from Trieste, Marta Verginella and Jože Pirjevec, Italian writer Claudio Magris from Trieste, French literary critic Antoine Spire, Italian journalist Paolo Rumiz, and Slovene literary historian Miran Košuta from Trieste.

In 2008, an influential article entitled Il caso Pahor" ("The Pahor Case"), deploring the fact that the author had remained unknown in Italy for so long and blaming the Italian nationalist milieu of Trieste for it, was published in the Italian journal La Repubblica:Forty years were needed for such an important author to gain recognition in his own country.

[20][21] However, support of 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 (Associazione cittadini liberi ed uguali), offering an alternative award that would explicitly mention anti-Fascism.

Pahor's major works include Vila ob jezeru (A Villa by the Lake), Mesto v zalivu (The City in the Bay), Nekropola (Pilgrim among the Shadows), a trilogy about Trieste and the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947) Spopad s pomladjo (A Difficult Spring), Zatemnitev (Obscuration), V labirintu (In the Labyrinth), and Zibelka sveta (The Cradle of the World).

In 2009, he ran on the list of the South Tyrolean People's Party as a representative of the Slovene Union for the European Parliament.

[38] He rejected these accusations, saying he had nothing against Bossman being black; he clarified his statement by saying that he would rather see a mayor from one of the indigenous ethnic groups from the region, either a Slovene or Istrian Italian.

[38] In March 2012, the Italian right-wing newspaper Il Giornale published a book review of his autobiography titled "Nobody's Son", in which the book reviewer labels Pahor a "Slovene nationalist" and "negationist" for his agreement with the historian Alessandra Kersevan's criticism of historical revisionism in Italy regarding foibe.

[39][40] The book review reproached Pahor for making personal observations about the period of Yugoslav occupation of Trieste (between May and June 1945), implying that he witnessed the events, although he did not reside in the city at the time.

[41] In August 2013, Pahor criticized Giorgio Napolitano and Janez Janša for not explicitly mentioning Italian Fascism alongside German Nazism and Slovenian/Yugoslav communism.