Sunrise Poison was completed in 1994, when Phillip Zhuwao was 23 years old. At the time of his death in January 1997, he was working on a second book of poems, and had completed two novels, See the Barbarous Lands and Iron Fleece.

Zhuwao's grandfather was originally a Lozi from Barotseland, while his mother's family came from Mozambique. This contributed to his family's disorientation: "I have three international identities, an abnormality hard to describe."

His early life was full of hardship: "We had been evicted from many farms - finally we settled at Chitungwiza, the urban centre of the tobacco farms. I spent most of my childhood in the tobacco, potato and cattle farms. Before I was to school, my uncle taught me Russian revolutionary history. It never interested me, but some names gave me inspiration." Phillip completed most of his school education at Chitungwiza.  "I saw bullets and blood. My father was a soldier. In 1987, to try and forget the terror of Inkomo Barracks and the pangaknives, we shifted to Kuwadzana in Harare."

His literary education was self-taught. "I read every book I came across, Shakespeare, Kipling, Rider Haggard. The books I couldn't buy I read in the bookshops, Kingstons mostly. I had to risk the wrath of security guards and the police. I would enter a bookshop, pick up Don Quixote, check for guards, and start reading where I left off the last time ... I read many books this way till I was unwelcome at the bookshop."

Zhuwao became fascinated by the Russian poets Pushkin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Akhmatova and Tsvetaeva, and also by classical greek mythology, and by other European modernists: Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Rilke. References to these writers are scattered through Sunrise Poison.

Despite his immersion in European literature, he remained grounded in African literature and African traditional culture. "Colonialists said a lot about African culture without understanding it. They mangled the little knowledge they had into horrendous tales of terrible witches and cannibals and shrieks of old hags sending chills down your spine. Rider Haggard was the most terrible. When Christianity came, it attacked loudly all African customs as devil-worship, refusing to get within, to understand and respect another man's comprehension of God."

Death and poetry were his abiding obsessions. "In 1987 death began to affect me personally. Dambudzo had died, my beloved cousin had died of haemophilia. Josephine Nyasha died after dousing herself with paraffin after a fight with her husband." Premonitions of his own death abound in Sunrise Poison. But, as he wrote in "My Blue Resignation Conclude":

“ in their short lives
 poets live longer”

- Robert Berold