The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

Longlisted for The Baillie Gifford Prize 2024

Prospect Magazine Books of the Year 2024: Lives

Guardian Best Biographies & Memoirs 2024

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique, a French colony, in 1925. As a young man, he volunteered to fight in de Gaulle’s army for the liberation of France, and trained to become a doctor and psychiatrist. His experiences as a Black man under French colonial rule had a profound effect on him. In 1952, he wrote Black Skin, White Masks, a vital analysis of the effects of racism on the human psyche.

He was later re-assigned to a hospital in French Algeria. It was here that he became involved in the rebellion of the National Liberation Front (FLN), who fought to break free from colonial power. Fanon’s work for the FLN as a propagandist and psychiatrist became highly contentious. His final work, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in 1961 just before he died at the age of 36. It has proved to be one of the most controversial yet influential books of our time.

The Rebel’s Clinic is a searing biography of the short and harrowing life of Frantz Fanon, and a brilliant, nuanced exploration of his ideas, whose legacy is still so powerful. In an age when debates about race and the effects of colonialism are ever more urgent, The Rebel’s Clinic is a profoundly relevant book.

Author: Adam Shatz