Kocbek was born in the village of Sveti Jurij ob Ščavnici in the Duchy of Styria,[2] then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Slovenia.

The couple moved to Sveti Jurij, where Valentin Kocbek worked as an organist in the local Roman Catholic church.

[5] He attended the German-language high school in Maribor, where he witnessed with enthusiasm the takeover of the town by the Slovene volunteers led by general Rudolf Maister.

[7] His Slovene language teacher was Anton Sovre, the most prominent classical philologist and translator from Greek in Slovenia between the two world wars.

For the rest of his life, Kocbek would maintain contacts with the circle around the French magazine Esprit, with which he felt the strongest intellectual affinity.

Throughout his life, Kocbek maintained contacts with several French Christian left thinkers, most notably with the writer Jean-Marie Domenach.

Shortly after the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Kocbek was among the founders of the Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation as member of its Christian Socialist group.

Just before the end of World War II, he was nominated as Minister for Slovenia in the interim Yugoslav government led by Josip Broz Tito.

In 1951, Kocbek published a volume of short stories, entitled "Fear and Courage" (Strah in pogum), in which he touched the issue of moral dilemmas in the Partisan fight during World War II.

In the years of his isolation, Kocbek turned almost exclusively to poetry, where he explored philosophical and ethical issues in a modernist style.

His later modernist poetry became an important source of inspiration for the young generations of Slovene authors, including such leading figures like Dominik Smole, Jože Snoj, Tomaž Šalamun, Marjan Rožanc, and many others.

The international pressure on Yugoslavia, especially the intervention of the German writer Heinrich Böll, was most probably the main element that protected Kocbek from judicial prosecution.

[22] In 1976, two of his closest friends, Viktor Blažič and Franc Miklavčič, were arrested and placed on trial for belonging to "Kocbek's secret circle."

Kocbek wrote a famous poem for the occasion, entitled A Microphone in the Wall (Mikrofon v zidu), in which he poetically juxtaposed technology to human activity.

In addition to Slovene, Kocbek was fluent in German, French, and Serbo-Croatian, and knew Latin and ancient Greek.