Saba Sebatyne is a Barabel from Barab I, created by Troy Denning for Star by Star (Del Rey, 2001), the pivotal novel of the New Jedi Order series. Barabels are large, scaled, cold-blooded pack predators, and Saba is written without any attempt to sand that down: she hunts, she laughs by hissing, and she refers to herself in the third person because that is how her people speak Basic.
She is one of the more successful attempts in Star Wars prose at a Jedi whose philosophy is genuinely alien. Barabel culture reveres the Jedi — an old debt, from a Jedi who once resolved a hunting dispute on Barab I — and Saba's understanding of the Force runs through predation, family and the pack rather than through serenity. The novels let that be a legitimate Jedi tradition rather than a problem to be corrected.
The Yuuzhan Vong war costs her almost everything: her homeworld's defence fails, her nest is destroyed, and Denning writes the grief as something that nearly breaks her rather than as flavour.
By the Legacy of the Force and Fate of the Jedi series she is a Master and, eventually, leads the Order — the first non-human to do so in the Legends continuity. That is a quietly significant thing for a franchise whose Jedi leadership had been human-shaped for thirty years of publishing.
