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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) was a novelist, essayist and writer of short fiction and poetry. Her collection Swimming Upside Down (Sarabande, 2027) was selected by Leslie Jamison as winner of the Sarabande Prize in the Essay. Her Substack of the same name is an ongoing archive of her work. She is the author of The Dancing Girl and the Turtle (Linen Press, 2017) and her work has appeared in Pleiades, The Common, Brevity Magazine, Hippocampus Magazine, Tahoma Literary Review, and the Shanghai Literary Review among others. Her work was selected by Maggie Nelson to win the 2022 Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Contest, was included as a 2024 Notable in The Best American Essays, and has received several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. The SweetLit Flash Fiction Contest will be renamed the Karen Kao Creative Nonfiction Flash Essay Prize in her honor. She was born in Los Angeles, CA and lived with her husband in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.