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Winner of the 2025 Sarabande Prize in the Essay, selected by Leslie Jamison
Swimming Upside Down by the late Karen Kao, a writer Maggie Nelson described “swerves with grace,” is a sharp-edged and sober account of a life deeply lived
In her posthumous publication, Swimming Upside Down by Karen Kao is about a woman, who becomes a patient who must come to terms with her terminal diagnosis and the fact that “She won’t be a patient forever.” With unflinching honesty Kao reflects on the people, events, and moments that have shaped her life. It is about joy and disappointment, anger, sex and desire. It’s about the mistakes we make and the love that we should never let go of. Her essay, “Fish Tales” included in this collection was selected by Maggie Nelson to win the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest. Nelson described the essay as having “great rhythm and propulsion. It’s pretty then gross then sad then worrying then exciting. It slips in and out of weird synecdoche, swerves with grace between divergent forms of address. It treads on cultural fault lines, familial discord, sensory experience, the move from childhood to adulthood, without wasting time explaining. I’d read a book of it.” Finally, here is that book.
Kao’s bawdy humor is reminiscent of the late Carrie Fisher, her insight and observations of life, illness, and death mirror Suleika Jaouad’s Between Two Kingdoms and contains the tenderness of When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Swimming Upside Down is a humbling, raucous, deep and tender, outrageous and fierce declaration of life.
PRAISE FOR SWIMMING UPSIDE DOWN
“[T]his book is utterly, unstoppably alive: embodied and unsentimental, blunt and bare-faced, messy and hungry. This is a book about loving the world and being injured by it, grasping at beauty with fingertips stained yellow by nicotine, leaning against the ones we love but also probing the wounds they’ve given us. It’s a book full of recklessness, desire, and the hard-won succor of seeing others in their full humanity—and then, always, casting that rigorous gaze back at the self. I’m grateful for the pivots and edges of this book, its style and its range—but most of all, for the oxygen of its honesty” –Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
PRAISE FOR KAREN KAO
“[The essay] has great rhythm and propulsion. It’s pretty then gross then sad then worrying then exciting. It slips in and out of weird synecdoche, swerves with grace between divergent forms of address. It treads on cultural fault lines, familial discord, sensory experience, the move from childhood to adulthood, without wasting time explaining. I’d read a book of it.” –Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets, in praise of “Fish Tales”
Karen Kao (1959-2025) worked as a novelist and essayist. She also wrote short fiction and poetry. Her debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle, the first of a projected quartet of novels set in Shanghai from the thirties to the fifties, was published in 2017. The second volume, The Pencil God was finished but remains unpublished. Karen’s essays had garnered significant acclaim, including winning the SweetLit Flash Fiction Contest 2024, a 2024 Notable by The Best American Essays, and winner of the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest. Her fiction and nonfiction received several Pushcart Prize nominations and her short fiction was nominated for the VERA. Karen's work can still be found on Substack. Before her passing she finished a collection of lyric essays under the title Swimming Upside Down which was selected by Leslie Jamison as winner of the 2025 Sarabande Prize in the Essay.