Tomaž Šalamun (July 4, 1941 – December 27, 2014) was a Slovenian poet who was a leading figure of postwar neo-avant-garde poetry in Central Europe[1] and an internationally acclaimed absurdist.

[6] After his family moved to Koper, the local high school teachers of French and Slovene aroused his interest in language.

[8] He spent five days in jail and came out something of a culture hero, but he refrained from including the poem in his first poetry book, which appeared in 1966 in a samizdat edition, full of absurdist irreverence, playfulness, and wild abandon.

[6][11] Matthew Zapruder wrote the following about him and his work in The New York Times: There was no purer contemporary surrealist than the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun, whose poems are not designed to be interpreted but instead to act upon us, in order to open up in us a little dormant space of weirdness where we can hopefully feel more free.

Literary critic Miklavž Komelj wrote:[15] "Šalamun’s inventiveness with language has, indeed, never been more dynamic than in his most recent books.