Born of an unknown father in Béni Saf in the Oran region of Algeria, the "poet who signed with a sun" was murdered in Algiers on 30 August 1973.

Sénac was a great admirer of the work of such poets as Gérard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud and Jean Genêt.

Sénac had a long-running relationship with French Algerian-born writer and Literary Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus that lasted from 1947 to 1958.

The contents of the letters remain mostly unknown, although Hamid Nacer-Khodja published a few and wrote about the history of the friendship in his essay Le Fils rebelle.

In April 1958 he broke relations with Albert Camus on a sour note blaming him for not supporting the plight of an Algerian student named Taleb executed for his political activities against the French.