Caleb Azumah Nelson

(UK, 1993), writer and photographer, grew up in south-east London, which is also the setting of his bestselling debut novel Open Water (2021). He has featured in many publications including Litro and The White Review; his short story Pray was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2020. Open Water won the Costa First Novel Award and Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards, and was a number-one Times bestseller. This is an intense love story: "tender, carefully observed and reported, shedding light on the limitations of masculinity." (The Guardian). Two young people meet in South East London. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists - he a photographer, she a dancer - trying to make their mark in a city that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence. Open Water asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body, to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength, to find safety in love, only to lose it. His second novel Small Worlds will be published in May 2023.