Quote by Dambudzo Marechera: “I thought that if one was sane in an insane world, one would appear to be mad.”

When the world around you operates according to logic that is corrupt, violent, or absurd, being clear-eyed and honest can look like madness to those who have adjusted. The person who refuses to accept the insane as normal will be marked as abnormal. This is both a personal confession and a diagnosis of how systems protect themselves.

The House of Hunger was published in 1978, as Zimbabwe was still Rhodesia under Ian Smith's white minority regime, fighting a liberation war that would end with independence in 1980. Marechera had been expelled from Oxford and was writing in exile, simultaneously outside the European literary world and the African nationalist literary mainstream.

Zimbabwean writer whose debut short story collection The House of Hunger (1978) won the Guardian Fiction Prize and announced one of the most distinctive voices in African literature. He lived as a nomad in Oxford and London, sleeping rough and writing ferociously, and died in Harare at thirty-five. His work refuses all comfort and convention.