Nana Nkweti
Nana’s creative journey has been flavored by the lingua franca of her life experiences: the colorful creoles of her communities she has called home – the pidgin English and franglais of West Africa, the street patois of neighborhoods from Brooklyn to Washington, D.C.; undergraduate years preparing herself for a career in international law by studying Mandarin and hanzi in Qingdao, scaling the Great Wall, and chuckling at signs in Chinglish. Ten years of adhering to the maxim primum est non nocere as a Licensed Practical Nurse, gave her an appreciation of the tenacity of the human spirit and strengthened her Latin lexicon. Likewise, in law school she learned terms like actus reus and ad infinitum as she worked on human rights projects to end trafficking of women and children in the Mekong Delta region.
Featured Work
WALKING ON COWRIE SHELLS
In her powerful, genre-bending debut story collection, Nana Nkweti’s virtuosity is on full display as she mixes deft realism with clever inversions of genre. In the Caine Prize finalist story “It Takes a Village, Some Say,” Nkweti skewers racial prejudice and the practice of international adoption, delivering a sly tale about a teenage girl who leverages her adoptive parents to fast-track her fortunes. In “The Devil Is a Liar,” a pregnant pastor’s wife struggles with the collision of western Christianity and her mother’s traditional Cameroonian belief system as she worries about her unborn child.
In other stories, Nkweti vaults past realism, upending genre expectations in a satirical romp about a jaded PR professional trying to spin a zombie outbreak in West Africa, and in a mermaid tale about a Mami Wata who forgoes her power by remaining faithful to a fisherman she loves. In between these two ends of the spectrum there’s everything from an aspiring graphic novelist at a comic con to a murder investigation driven by statistics to a story organized by the changing hairstyles of the main character.
Pulling from mystery, horror, realism, myth, and graphic novels, Nkweti showcases the complexity and vibrance of characters whose lives span Cameroonian and American cultures. A dazzling, inventive debut, Walking on Cowrie Shells announces the arrival of a superlative new voice.
