International Freak

A critical biography of the radical South African author and activist Robin Farquharson.

Born in 1930 into a privileged South African family, Robin Farquharson was part of a new wave of intellectuals who tasked themselves with reimagining society in the wake of World War II—until a phone call from God brought everything crashing down. Under the gaze of the secret police and his own mounting paranoia, Farquharson fled to Swinging London and tried to reinvent himself as a countercultural guru. Along the way, he helped to have South Africa banned from the Olympic Games, authored an unclassifiable memoir of queer street life, and climbed to the top of the mysterious White Panther Party. Then, just days after founding the pioneering Mental Patients Union, flames ripped through his home and Farquharson was gone. Drawing on meticulous archival research and extensive new interviews, International Freak marshals an extraordinary cast of characters in order to tell Farquharson’s story for the first time. Equal parts experimental biography, social history, and psychedelic true crime, this is a portrait of a singular man and the world he sought desperately to transform.

M. Syd Rosen writes about fame, fantasy, and radical politics, with a particular interest in marginal and experimental publishing. He was recently awarded a PhD in the History of Science from the University of Cambridge, where his research explored the work of literary impresario John Brockman. Alongside his writing Rosen is the co-director of Jargon, a non-profit dedicated to diasporic culture.