JEAN SÉNAC (1926-1973) is an Algerian poet who wrote love poems and militant poems on the fight for Algerian independence in French.

“The poems of Jean Sénac sing in a long, sustained and pure voice of the land where the sun has its workshop— a workshop whose roof is the night and for whom man is a disappointing and marvelous achievement.”—René Char

“I think of his furor, his cries, his refusals: because the Arab world that he loved has forgotten, in a particularly harsh way, what it knew of freedom and poetry, only to replace them with falsehoods backed up with arms and the gloved hand placed over the mouths of those who attempt to speak.”—Tahar Ben Jelloun