The House of Hunger

Dambudzo Marechera, the son of a lorry driver, was born in 1955 in Vengere township, Rusape Rhodesia. Marechera went to a mission boarding school, supported by scholarships. He subsequently went on to the University of Rhodesia, from which he was expelled in 1973 following a protest demonstration. A scholarship took him to the University of Oxford in 1974. During the next eight years Marechera remained in exile in England but with no fixed abode or employment. He had brushes with the police which led to detentions and imprisonment. His return to Zimbabwe in 1982 was traumatic: independent Zimbabwe was no more accommodating to him than Ian Smith's Rhodesia. He died tragically young in 1987, a victim of the AIDS virus. His collection of short stories, The House of Hunger, was published in 1978 to considerable critical acclaim. It won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. This was followed in 1980 by his novel Black Sunlight (also published by Heinemann) and Mindblast in 1984 (The College Press, Harare). The Black Insider, which was written in 1978, has been published posthumously by Baobab Books in Zimbabwe.