Jorge de Sena

Portuguese poet, novelist, playwright, a prolific writer in various genres. A civil engineer by training, he fled to Brazil in 1959 after an assassination coup against the the dictator Salazar failed. De Sena feared that his role would be discovered. In Brazil, he earned a doctorate in humanities. With his wife and nine children he later emigrated to the US and lived in California for the rest of his life. His 1978 novel Signs of Fire is semi-autobiographical and takes place in Portugal at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He died of cancer on 4 June 1978 in Santa Barbara, California, aged 58.