Azumah

Mary Jean Chan, Caleb Azumah Nelson and AK Blakemore are among the shortlistees for this year’s Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize.The award, worth £20,000, celebrates poetry, novels, short stories and drama by writers aged 39 and under in honour of the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who died at that age.Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, Catherine Lacey and Joshua Jones also made the shortlist. Jones was the only debut author selected, with his short story collection Local Fires, inspired by real events and people in his home town of…

Peckham, a district of south-east London formerly associated with substandard housing, tabloid reports of criminality and overpolicing, has been in the throes of a remarkable transformation over the last decade. Not only has it witnessed gentrification but, as seen in the recent film Rye Lane and in Caleb Azumah Nelson’s novel Small Worlds, it is increasingly a site of inspiration for creative artists.Small Worlds, the follow-up to Nelson’s multi-award-winning debut Open Water, focuses on Stephen, a teenage…

Chaotic conditions in Peckham: brolly-ruining wind, sudden showers, one of those afternoons when the weather apps show every symbol from sunshine to lightning and leave you to figure it out. Caleb Azumah Nelson, the 29-year-old author and artist whose prose and photographs tend to document life in south London, was meant to be showing me around today. We might have swung by the Peckhamplex cinema, the public library off Rye Lane, maybe getting as far as Morley’s burger bar to the south or Bagel King further north – all of…