Writer and photographer · Ghana
Caleb Azumah Nelson
Caleb Azumah Nelson (born 1993) is a British-Ghanaian writer and photographer from south-east London. His debut novel, Open Water (2021), about two young Black artists falling in love — the narrator a photographer — won the Costa First Novel Award. Photography runs through his writing as well as his own work with the camera.
Updated 2 min read
Caleb Azumah Nelson was born in 1993 and grew up in south-east London, in a family of Ghanaian heritage. He studied sports and exercise science at Coventry University, and began making both photographs and writing, finding in each a way to record Black life in London with tenderness.
His debut novel, Open Water (2021), follows two young Black British artists, a photographer and a dancer, as they fall in and out of love; it is written in the second person and pays close attention to how moments look as well as how they feel. It won the Costa First Novel Award for 2021 (announced in January 2022, with a £5,000 prize) and the debut novel of the year at the British Book Awards 2022, and the National Book Foundation named him one of its 5 Under 35. He has since published Small Worlds (2023).
He appears here among Ghanaian photographers, though most readers know him first as a novelist.
How to read the connection: the narrator of Open Water is a photographer, and the book looks the way a photographer thinks, in framed moments, light and the question of who is being seen. We have not found a published portfolio of his own photographs, so the place to look is the novel. That reading is this site's own. See our lists of Ghanaian artists and African photographers.
