Dambudzo Marechera (4 June 1952 – 18 August 1987) was a Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright and poet. His short career produced a book of stories, two novels (one published posthumously), a book of plays, prose, and poetry, and a collection of poetry (also posthumous). His first book, a fiction collection entitled The House of Hunger (1978), won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. Marechera was best known for his abrasive, heavily detailed and self-aware writing, which was considered a new frontier in African literature, and his unorthodox behaviour at the universities from which he was expelled despite excelling in his studies. Early life Marechera, Christian name Charles William, was born in Vengere Township, Rusape, Southern Rhodesia, to Isaac Marechera, a mortuary attendant, and Masvotwa Venenzia Marechera, a maid. He was the child of Shona parents from the eastern-central part of Rhodesia. In his 1978 book, The House of Hunger, and in interviews, Marechera demonstrates remarkable imagination and skill in the blending of art and real life, using his constrained and traumatic ghetto upbringing to abstract about his father having been either run over by "a 20th-century train" or come home "with a knife sticking from his back" or having been "found in the hospital mortuary with his body riddled with bullets". In search of original accounts of Marechera's childhood and upbringing, the German researcher Flora Veit-Wild gave considerable weight to an account given by Marechera's older brother, Michael, about what was said to be a destructive element in the younger Marechera's life. When Marechera returned from London and was made Writer-in-Residency at the University of Zimbabwe, his mother and sisters reportedly attempted to come and meet him but he rejected them offhand, accusing the mother of trying to kill him. Indeed, it is known from anecdotal accounts that Marechera never enjoyed strong relations with any member of his family after he came back to Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, up until the time he died in 1987. He grew up amid racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. He attended St. Augustine's Mission, Penhalonga, where he clashed with his teachers over the colonial teaching syllabus, and he went on to the University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe), from which he was expelled during student unrest, and New College, Oxford, where his unsociable behaviour and academic dereliction led to another expulsion. Publishing success and subsequent years His first book and magnum opus, The