Jan Zábrana (4 July 1931 in Herálec – 3 September 1984 in Prague) was a Czech writer and translator.
From 1952 to 1953, Zábrana worked in the Tatra Smíchov tram factory in Prague, and the following year in an enamel factory in Radotín, and wrote poems and short stories (published after the fall of the communist regime in 1989 in the book Sedm povídek).
At this time he met many writers, both his elders (Vladimír Holan, Jiří Kolář) and his peers Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Bohumil Hrabal).
His interest focused mainly on Russian and American literature, including Aksjonov, Ivan Bunin, Cvetajeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Babel, and Platonov; and Allen Ginsberg, Graham Greene, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Ferlinghetti, Ezra Pound, and Gregory Corso.
In the normalization period of the 1970s, later in the 1980s, he wrote poetry and continued with his diaries, published in 1992 under the title Celý život (A Whole Life).