Youcef Sebti

Youcef Sebti was born in Boudiouga near Skikda and completed advanced studies in agricultural sciences and rural sociology at the National Agronomic Institute (INA) in El Harrach, Algiers. A brilliant, nonconformist member of the literary generation of Jean Sénac, he published the electrifying poetry collection 'L'Enfer et le pouce' in 1981.

Sebti's verses fused surrealist imagery with burning meditations on peasant labor, human vulnerability, and the Algerian earth. On the night of December 27, 1993, he was brutally assassinated in his professor's dormitory at the INA, one of the tragic intellectual martyrs of the dark decade.