Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Open Water has clinched the top prize for a debut novel, winning the £5,000 Costa First Novel Award.
Caleb Azumah Nelson, a Ghanian-British short-story writer and photographer, was working part-time at an Apple store when he quit his job in 2019 to focus on writing Open Water. Written in a single summer, the novel was described by the judges as “deeply moving, searingly intimate and just so now,” as well as being a “contemporary portrait of masculinity – [that was] like nothing else [they had] ever read.”
Speaking on the novel, Nelson said, “The main thing I was trying to hone in on was this story of intimacy between people who might feel romantically for each other – these moments that often go unnoticed and undocumented but are really the fabric of our lives. I think that my background as a photographer means that I’m just attracted to these really tiny moments in people’s lives that l expand outwards.”
So pleased to say Open Water has won the Costa First Novel Prize! Beyond grateful and feeling truly blessed by all this book has done 💙🙏🏾
Massive congrats to all shortlisted writers and every category winner 💙🏆 pic.twitter.com/Ew0J5YhGLQ
— Caleb Azumah Nelson (@CalebANelson) January 4, 2022
Further on his inspiration for the novel, which is filled with tributes to Black creativity, culture, and life, Nelson said, “Open Water is a love story but it’s also an ode to everything I love: South East London and books, music and photography, film and fine art. I wanted to write a book which read like an album, like music, so musicians such as Kendrick Lamar and Solange and J Dilla were instrumental to the conception of the book. Photography too – I often feel like when I’m writing, I’m transcribing snapshots of moments I can see.”
1. Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson. Wow. What a start. What a gut-wrenchingly beautiful, painful, lyrical gem of a novel. About love, trauma, art, oppression, and existing as a black person in a world which sees you often as a body rather than a person, a soul. Please go read it!
— Bianca Gillam (@BinxGillam) January 3, 2022
Open Water follows the life of a young Black-British couple, a photographer and a dancer, as they navigate the frailties of intimacy, love, and longing in modern Britain. A devastatingly beautiful novel, filled with examinations of the simultaneously small, yet monumental, emotional intimacies that texture our lives, Open Water is startingly in its passion, and highly deserving of its win.
