Šeligo was born in a
Slovene family in
Sušak,
Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now part of the city of
Rijeka, Croatia. In 1939, he moved with his family to the industrial town of
Jesenice in north-western Slovenia. After finishing high school, he worked as an industrial worker in the local
iron mill for few years. He then moved to the small town of
Tolmin, where he finished a teacher's academy. In 1956, he moved to
Ljubljana, where he enrolled in the
University of Ljubljana, studying philosophy and sociology. In Ljubljana, Šeligo became involved with a group of young and intellectuals known as the
Critical generation. He published several short stories in the alternative literary journal
Revija 57. He became friends with the dissident intellectual
Jože Pučnik, and witnessed his arrest in 1958. In 1962, he became a lecturer at the School for Sociology and Working Management in
Kranj, and continued publishing his works, mostly in the alternative journal
Perspektive. When the journal was forced to close down by the
Communist regime, Šeligo entered a "creative strike", refusing to publish any of his works for two years. In the late 1960s, he started collaborating the renowned literary theorists and philosopher
Dušan Pirjevec Ahac. In the 1987, Šeligo was elected as president of the
Slovene Writers' Association. In a period of social and political ferment, Šeligo used his position to transform the association in an open platform of public debate, promoting the values of pluralism and democracy. In 1989, he was among the founding members of the
Slovenian Democratic Union. In the first free elections in Slovenia in 1990, he was elected to the
Slovenian Parliament. Between 1990 and 1994, he also presided the Advisiory Board of the
Slovenian Radio and Television Broadcast. In 1994, he joined the
Slovenian Social Democratic Party. Between June and November 2000, he served as Minister for Culture in the short lived centre-right government of
Andrej Bajuk. During this short period, he compiled the so-called "National Program for Culture", an integrative document on the aims of cultural policy in Slovenia, which became the basis for the cultural policies of all later Slovenian governments. In 2001, he became a member of the
Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He died in Ljubljana and was buried in the
Žale cemetery. == Work ==