After finishing seventh in both the 5 km and 10 km races at the 2025 USA Swimming Open Water Swimming National Championships in Florida a few weeks ago, 27-year-old veteran Becca Mann continues with her day job – writing books and screenplays.
In her teenager years, she earlier wrote The Eyes Trilogy, a 3-part fantasy series including The Stolen Dragon of Quanx. She recently released her 256-page hardcover memoir Outside the Lanes, A Pro Swimmer’s Story of Resilience, Reinvention, and Redefining Success (available for order here).
Now, within the same month, she is coming out with her dystopian novel UNRULY.
She explains her newest work of fiction, “UNRULY is a story of self-discovery, sisterhood, and figuring out who you are when you’re thrust into a new world.
UNRULY was written all over the world — from my parents’ basement to Los Angeles, to France, Greece, Israel, Montenegro, Portugal, Italy, Croatia, England, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, and Malta. It’s a story that came to life while I was figuring out who I wanted to be after 20 years of staring at a black line on the bottom of a pool. I poured so much into this story.”
For more information on the 446-page novel, visit here on Amazon.
Former teammate Ashley Twichell, a 2020 Olympian and two-time World Champion says, “Unruly brilliantly captures the terror of perfectionism, and what happens when the pressure to be everything finally breaks you. Thought-provoking, emotional, and impossible to put down.”
Michelle Askew, a Netflix writer, says, “Unruly captures the rawness and duality of adolescence––the reckless self-abandonment necessary to survive is constantly at war with the fearlessness necessary to grow.”
Peri Segel, a TV writer for Disney, Netflix, and DreamWorks, says, “A riveting blend of sisterhood and jaw-dropping twists that will leave you breathless. With every turn of the page, Unruly asks: how far would you go to protect your family and image––and at what cost to yourself?”
Jo Macariola, a clinical psychologist, says, “Unruly is more than a dystopian drama––it’s a deeply compassionate look at anxiety and the cost of holding yourself together when the world expects you to never fall apart.”
Becca graduated with a BFA in Writing for Screen and Television at the University of Southern California. She previously worked as the Writers’ Assistant on Amazon’s The Bondsman, Script Coordinator on Apple TV’s The Morning Show, Showrunner’s Assistant on Amazon’s The Wilds, and Writers’ PA on Freeform’s Cruel Summer. Her screenplay Exiled was a 2-time finalist in the 2020 Austin Film Festival and the winner of the 2021 ISA Fast Track Historical Genre and her pilot Soar was a semifinalist in the Humanitas Carol Mendelson category.
Running parallel to her literary career, Mann was a member of the USA Swimming National Team from 2012 until 2021. She was the eighth fastest swimmer in the world in the 800m freestyle three years in a row, was the youngest person to place in the Top 10 in four events at a single Olympic Trials, a 2-time USA Swimming national champion, represented Team USA at 4 World Championships and remains the only person in history to complete the Maui Nui Swim.
For more information, visit www.becca-mann.com.
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