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.

[citation needed] He joined the rootless communities around Oxford and other places, sleeping in friends' sitting-rooms and writing various fictional and poetic pieces on park benches and being regularly mugged by thugs and harassed by the police for vagrancy.

[2] Marechera's first book and magnum opus, The House of Hunger (1978) – a collection of one novella and nine satellite short stories – came immediately after his largely disappointing time at New College, Oxford.

[citation needed] Marechera's 1980 experimental novel Black Sunlight 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.

However, he fell out with the director and remained behind in Zimbabwe when the crew left, leading a homeless existence in Harare before his death there five years later in 1987, from an AIDS-related pulmonary disorder, aged 35.

[8] Mindblast; or, The Definitive Buddy (1984) was written the year after his return home and comprises three plays, a prose narrative, a collection of poems, and a park-bench diary.

[citation needed] 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.

[citation needed] Since Marechera's death, dozens of younger writers and many of his colleagues have written numerous accounts and biographies detailing his troubled life and works.

In an article in Wasafiri magazine in March 2012, Wild replied to the question about why she "did not write a proper Dambudzo Marechera biography" by saying: "My answer was that I did not want to collapse his multi-faceted personality into one authoritative narrative but rather let the diverse voices speak for themselves.