House of Hunger (1978), came immediately after his largely disappointing time at New College, Oxford University. Among the nine stories it contains, the long title story describes the narrator's troubled childhood and youth in colonial Rhodesia in a style that is emotionally compelling and verbally pyrotechnic. The narrative is characterized by shifts in time and place and a blurring of fantasy and reality. Regarded as signalling a new trend of incisive and visionary African writing, The House of Hunger was awarded the 1979 Guardian Fiction Prize. Marechera was the first and the only African to have won the award in its 33 years (it was replaced in 1999 by the Guardian First Book Award). Black Sunlight (1980) has been compared with the writing of James Joyce and Henry Miller but it did not achieve the critical success of The House of Hunger. Loosely structured and stylistically hallucinatory, with erudite digressions on various literary and philosophical points of discussion, Marechera's second book explores the idea of anarchism as a formal intellectual position. The Black Insider, posthumously published in 1990, is set in a faculty of arts building that offers refuge for a group of intellectuals and artists from an unspecified war outside, which subsequently engulfs them as well. The conversation of the characters centres on African identity and the nature of art, with the protagonist arguing that the African image is merely another chauvinistic figure of authority. At the University of Oxford, Marechera struck his professors as a very intelligent but rather anarchic student who had no particular interest in adhering to course syllabi, choosing rather to read whatever struck his fancy. He also had a reputation for being a quarrelsome young man who did not hesitate to fight his antagonists physically, especially in the pubs around Oxford. He began to display erratic behaviour, which may have been a result of excessive drinking or culture shock but which the school psychologist diagnosed as schizophrenia. Marechera threatened to murder certain people and attempted to set the university on fire. He was also famous — or notorious — for having no respect for authority derived from notions of racial or class superiority. For trying to set the college on fire, Marechera was given two options: either to submit to a psychiatric examination or be sent down; he chose the latter, charging that they were mentally raping him. At this point Marechera's life became