Nana Nkweti is an American Cameroonian writer and the author of the short story collection Walking on Cowry Shells, which won a Whiting Award.
The New York Times Book Review hailed it as a "raucous and thoroughly impressive debut" with "utterly original stories" that "range from laugh-out-loud funny to heartbreaking, and are often both.
In a profile of Nkweti, Open Country Mag wrote that "the stories also speak to the universal idea of people charting next steps, growing and evolving along the way", going on to note: The title “Walking on Cowrie Shells” is a play on the English idiom.
She deploys it in the book to embody that sense of being in a threshold, in liminal spaces, of teetering between choices, between cultures or identities.
[8]The New Yorker wrote that the stories are "Lively and fast-paced, funny and tragic" and that they "refuse a singular African experience in favor of a vivid plurality.