Swimming Studies

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Observer

Back in print, a “fusion of cool, clear-eyed prose and watercolors, photographs and painted portraits” (Time Out New York) by celebrated author and artist Leanne Shapton, on a sport that has shaped her life.

Intimate with chlorinated space; weightless yet limited; closed off to taste, sound, and most sight; acutely aware of the clock: this is a swimmer’s state. When ten-year-old Leanne Shapton joins an Ontario township swim team with her brother, she finds an affinity for its rhythms—and spends years training, making it to the Olympic trials twice.

Swimming Studies reflects on her time immersed in a world of rigor and determination, routine and competition, pairing together contemplative essays and paintings. Vivid details of an aquatic life appear: adolescence in suburban Canada, dawn risings for morning practice, bus rides with teammates, a growing collection of swimsuits, dips in lakes and oceans. When she trades athletic pursuits for artistic ones, the metrics of moving through water endure.

In these elegant and potent meditations, Shapton renders swimming as a mode of experiencing time, movement, and perspective, capable of shaping our lives in every environment.

Author Biography

Leanne Shapton is an author, artist, and publisher based in New York City. She is currently the art editor at The New York Review of Books. She is the cofounder, with photographer Jason Fulford, of J&L Books, an internationally distributed not-for-profit imprint specializing in art and photography books. Shapton is a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. She grew up in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.