As members of the Slovene minority in Italy (1920–1947), Šalamun’s mother’s family joined thousands of Slovenes who left their homes because of forced Italianization and moved from Italy to Yugoslavia, where he was born in 1941 in Zagreb. His father’s family came from Ptuj, where his grandfather had been a mayor. After his family moved to Koper, the local high school teachers of French and Slovene aroused his interest in language. In 1960, he began to study art history and history at University of Ljubljana. His mother was an art historian, his brother Andraž is an artist, and his two sisters Jelka and Katarina are a biologist and a literary historian respectively. Šalamun died on 27 December 2014 in Ljubljana.

In 1964, as editor of the literary magazine Perspektive, he published his iconoclastic poem “Duma ’64” (Thought ’64). When Ivan Maček, a Titoist hard-liner, saw the dead cat in the poem as a reference to himself (the Slovene word maček means ‘cat’), Perspektive was banned and Šalamun was arrested. 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.

In July 1970, he was personally invited to exhibit his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Šalamun spent two years at the University of Iowa, including one year in the International Writing Program from 1971 to 1972, and lived for periods of time in the United States after that. From 2005 to 2007 he taught at the University of Pittsburgh.

Šalamun won a Pushcart Prize, as well as Slovenia’s Prešeren Fund Award and Jenko Prize. Šalamun and his German translator, Fabjan Hafner, were awarded the European Prize for Poetry by the German city of Muenster. In 2004, he was the recipient of Romania’s Ovid Festival Prize.