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.

“Robin Farquharson lived on the margins and might have dropped below memory’s horizon altogether had he not found, in Rosen, an ebullient and riveting chronicler.” – Marina Warner

“A wild headrush of a biography that captures the chaos, madness and energy of the London psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.” –  John Higgs

“Vastly well researched, skilfully assembled and elegantly written, M. Syd Rosen’s book has made good the omission. I have written two books on the era. I wish this had been one of them.” – Jonathon Green

“Rosen is an intergenerational talent. That is, he seems to move effortlessly across decades, from dark matter to illumination; gleaning, recovering, challenging, making new.” – Iain Sinclair