Last week, the American Library in Paris announced the winner of their 2024 Book Award, which recognizes titles originally published in English “that best realizes new and intellectually significant ideas about France, the French people, or encounters with French culture.” This year’s winner is Adam Shatz, for The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Life of Frantz Fanon.

The 2024 Book Award jury—Andrew Sean Greer (jury chair), Ayelet Waldman, and Jonas Hassen Khemiri—described the book as “an unflinching portrayal of a revolutionary figure torn between his ideals and inner turmoil,” and added:

The personal story Shatz brings to life is remarkable but the book’s real accomplishment is to illuminate the development of Fanon’s ideology, political, intellectual and profoundly personal, even emotional. Shatz has given us a Fanon for all thinkers and readers, captured with freshness and clarity and vitality–a Fanon for our present moment.

Like many idealists from my generation, I was enamored with Fanon’s books, especially The Wretched of the Earth. However, also like many of my contemporaries, I eventually began to challenge the anti-Colonial activist’s notions of acceptable terrorist violence. Still, this award winning biography’s broader view benefits from the six decades of scholarship since Fanon’s suicide.