There is a scene halfway through Caleb Azumah Nelson’s latest novel, Small Worlds, where the protagonist Stephen — a teenage second-generation migrant of Ghanaian parents — visits his family friend Auntie Yaa’s local Afro-Caribbean food shop. As he rounds the corner of Peckham High Street, he finds the shutters down, a padlock affixed to the door. “Rent raised,” Stephen’s older brother Ray later explains to him. “Doubled. Tripled. Auntie’s shop is done.”
When I meet Nelson on a bright morning in a cafe on Peckham’s vibrant Rye Lane, I can’t help but think that it is exactly the kind of place that might have replaced Auntie Yaa’s. Esoteric variations of coffee beans and organic milks line the walls, light bouncing off the minimalist white and ecru interiors. We are surrounded by a frankly startling amount of Fisherman beanies.
“I think it was like 15 years ago when I first noticed not only the landscape changing but the community,” 30-year-old Nelson tells me, sipping a batch brew. “I could see the Afro-Caribbean shops — the hair shops, nail shops, barbers — which were a mainstay of my childhood, one by one beginning to disappear. At the time, there was a real level of, not just frustration, but actual anger. It was like, where’s the community going? Who’s looking out for us?”
The nucleus of the black community in London, Peckham has more recently become synonymous with a cautionary tale of rampant gentrification, its local community increasingly pushed further and further out by spiralling house prices and big money now sniffing around SE15. When I gesture to the space around us — a slight elephant in the room — Nelson smiles knowingly.
I could see the Afro-Caribbean shops — the hair shops, nail shops, barbers — which were a mainstay of my childhood, one by one beginning to disappear
“So much of the problem of gentrification and the way it changes community is not necessarily in the regeneration spaces, new shiny places like this,” he says, pointing towards the ceiling. “Because, you know, I also like coffee! But it’s the ways in which the consistent community just isn’t looked out for, the material gain that comes at their expense.”
Like his multi-award winning debut Open Water, Small Worlds, which recently came out in paperback and this month won the Dylan Thomas prize, is a paean to Nelson’s native south-east London.
Following Stephen and his childhood sweetheart Del through the last years of their teenagehood, it is an intimate exploration of migration, family, romance and masculinity, all set to the synaesthetic sounds and smells of Noughties Peckham — and the portents of its impending social transformation. Born in Lewisham, Nelson grew up in neighbouring Catford and Bellingham, just a few stops from Peckham Rye on the Southeastern rail. “Even though I haven’t ever lived in Peckham, a lot of my family used to live here so we had that really strong community,” he says.,
After attending a predominantly black state primary school, Nelson, an avid reader and budding sportsman, won a full scholarship to the prestigious — and predominantly white — £25,000-a-year Alleyn’s School in Dulwich.
“It was a culture shock,” Nelson tells me. “I felt like a stranger in a village.”
As a scholarship kid, Nelson automatically attracted attention. “It’s not like that’s a secret — everyone knew I wasn’t paying,” he says. “That kind of gap is really big. And the racial divide was also huge — so much of my time at school was me having to explain myself.”
After studying English at Coventry University, Nelson found himself back in south-east London, “floating”, as he describes it. Working part-time jobs, he spent whatever free time he could find in the space between, diligently writing. Two years were spent trying and failing to find an agent. “It was either silence, or like, ‘I love your work, but there’s no place for it in the market’,” he says. His now agent, however, responded within 20 minutes, suggesting he work the essays he had pitched into a novel, which became Open Water.
He was with his mum in a cafe when he got the first set of publishing offers, which quickly turned into a lucrative nine-way bidding war. “I was choosing a cake — red velvet, I still remember! — and I just saw this email come in with this group of bids, and I was watching the numbers climb up, and I was just like, ‘Whoa, I don’t have to work for anyone else again, I can just write.’”
The book would go on to be shortlisted for an enormous number of literary prizes — the Dylan Thomas, the Betty Trask, the Somerset Maugham, the Gordon Burn and the Desmond Elliott — and win the Costa first novel award in 2022. He also secured a deal with production company Brock Media to adapt the novel into screenplays.
But the book’s whirlwind publication week was marred by an all-too-familiar experience. “I moved to Gipsy Hill the week Open Water was coming out,” Nelson tells me. “I was popping out to Sainsbury’s, and I got stopped and searched. I was just like, ‘This is mad’.
One of the earliest memories I have is of a young black man being stomped on by police near my house
“They don’t see a novelist. They just see what they always have.”
For Stephen, Del and Ray in Small Worlds, the police killing of Mark Duggan and the subsequent so-called London riots in the summer of 2011 serve as the contours of their young adulthood. Chronologically, the book can be divided into before and after Duggan, a narrative that Nelson feels mirrors the trajectory of his own life.
“It’s part of me in such a big way,” he says. “I was about 14 at the time, and I was increasingly beginning to be stopped and searched on the street. I knew that a lot of the times those stops and searches could end in violence.” Like many black Brits, it was a moment that deeply changed Nelson, the symbolic apotheosis of years of mistreatment and suspicion by law enforcement.
“One of the earliest memories I have is of a young black man being stomped on by police near my house,” he tells me. “I must have been like four or five at the time. Even at that age I could tell that something was really off. I just saw him on the ground, being stomped.
“Initially, I wanted to write a book about the London protests, and maybe I still will,” he says. “We’re still living in the wake of it.” Small Worlds, though, contains far more beauty than pain. It is a love letter to music, the refrain “the one thing that can solve most of our problems is dancing” echoing throughout Nelson’s prose.
“Music was always playing in my house when I was growing up,” he says. “If it’s Sunday, we’re listening to gospel, any other time it could be R&B, garage. If I go over to my parents’ house there’s just music blaring. It’s a really comforting thing, constantly being reminded of a really beautiful childhood.”
Peckham’s nightlife serves as the antidote to the characters’ trauma, something Nelson feels that, with the closure of clubs and bars, we are losing.
“There was a real sense of spontaneity,” he says. “Now, if I’m trying to go out, I have to plan it months in advance. Those impromptu gatherings seem to have disappeared. I really wanted to write to that experience.
“Music has always made that space for me. That’s what I’m trying to make my writing do.”
