How I Learned to Swim

Shortlisted for the Popcorn Writing Award 2024

Grieving is weird and expensive.

Jamie can’t swim. Fuelled by guilt and a need to mend her broken family, at 30 years old, she's taking on her biggest fear — the ocean.

With the help of a chipper swim instructor, a shady spiritual guide, and one cathartic crab sandwich, she questions, 'How many lengths does it take to wash away regret?'

Brilliantly witty, deeply heartfelt, this play explores what lies beneath the surface of the Black diasporic relationship to water. Somebody Jones’s searing debut How I Learned to Swim is 'funny with fear, liberating with grief' (Fringe Review) and impossible to walk away from unchanged.

This edition was published to coincide with the Prentice Productions show at Summerhall’s Roundabout, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August 2024.