Caleb Azumah Nelson wins Costa first novel award for Open Water
Caleb Azumah Nelson was working part-time in the Apple Store in London when he decided to “take a gamble” on himself and try to write his first novel. On Tuesday evening, his debut, Open Water, was named winner of the Costa first novel award, praised by judges as “deeply moving, searingly intimate and just so now”.
Open Water follows the lives of two young Black British artists – he a photographer, she a dancer – as they start to fall in love after meeting in a south-east London pub. It beat titles including AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches and Kate Sawyer’s The Stranding to win the £5,000 Costa prize. “We all loved this contemporary portrait of masculinity – it’s like nothing else we’ve ever read,” said judges.
Nelson, a British-Ghanaian short story writer and photographer, said it was “so surreal” to be named winner of the award. “I think I am honestly still getting used to the fact that I have not only put a book out, but that it’s been really well received. All writers do this – you kind of commit these acts of bravery by putting words down on the page, and then you close your eyes when you’ve done it and hope someone might read it,” he said.
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Nelson quit his job at the Apple Store to write Open Water, spending the summer of 2019 in the British Library writing all day. The manuscript sparked a nine-way bidding war before ending up with Viking, an imprint of Penguin.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Claire Fuller won the £5,000 Costa novel award for her fourth novel, Unsettled Ground, the story of 51-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius, who live in poverty and rural isolation with their mother, Dot, until her death means they are at risk of losing everything. Already shortlisted for the Women’s prize, it is a “masterpiece of storytelling and craft”, said judges.
“I’m still lost for words to have won,” said Fuller, who beat authors including Nadifa Mohamed and Elif Shafak to the prize. “It’s an amazing privilege to be recognised in this way.”
The novel has its roots in Fuller’s son’s discovery of an abandoned caravan in the woods. “It was derelict and empty, and my son just knows I like weird places. So I went out to see it, and it was just really atmospheric. It made me start thinking: who would have lived here? And how would they have managed?” she said. “And then Jeanie, the main character, was just created in my head without knowing what her story would be or where she came from, or even that she had a twin brother. I had no idea till I started writing it.”
John Preston won the Costa biography award for Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell, which judges called an “epic, immersive, cinematic telling” of the life of the late media mogul and MP. The poetry prize went to former London teacher Hannah Lowe for The Kids, which draws on a decade of teaching in an inner-city London sixth form, and the children’s book category was won by Manjeet Mann for The Crossing, a verse novel inspired by the refugee crisis, about two teenagers from very different worlds.
The Costas are open solely to authors resident in the UK and Ireland, and go to the “most enjoyable” books of the year. The Crossing, said judges, “will enrich all who read it”, while The Kids made judges “want to punch the air with joy”.
A panel of judges chaired by the journalist and broadcaster Reeta Chakrabarti will now select the Costa book of the year from the five category winners, to be announced on 1 February. Last year, Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch took the overall £30,000 prize.
