A profound, even if exaggeratedly self-aware writer, an instinctive nomad and bohemian in temperament, Marechera was a writer in constant quest for his real self -- Wole SoyinkaA terrible beauty is born out of the urgency of his vision -- Angela CarterThe metaphors are simultaneously so unclichéd and so apt that he reinvigorates the language -- China Mieville on THE BOOKS THAT MADE MELike overhearing a scream -- Doris Lessing

A writer who considered fiction a 'form of combat', his work is complex, challenging - and uniquely potent

-- Chris Power ? The Guardian Dambudzo Marechera was born in 1952 in Vengere, the township of Rusape, in the east of what was then Rhodesia. He was the third of nine children in a family which became destitute once his father was killed in a road accident in 1966. he gained a scholarship to study at New College, Oxford, where he was sent down in 1976 to live out his exile in Britain in a succession of squats for another six years. He hammered out the first draft of The House of Hunger on his portable typewriter in a matter of weeks. It won the Guardian First Novel Prize and was translated into six languages. Marechera died in 1987 after being diagnosed with AIDS.