Dispersals

HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2025
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASLE-UKI BOOK PRIZE 2025
LONGLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2025 'An invigorating cross-pollination of memoir and natural history, both beautifully phrased and delicately structured - this book deserves your time and attention' Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion. In Dispersals, she examines the echoes and counterpoints in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them. Combining memoir, history and scientific research, Lee questions how both plants and people come to belong - or not - and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine. 'Contemplative, elegant' New Statesman 'At once expansive and intimate, and most of all, gorgeously written. This is a book I will return to often over the course of my life' Nina Mingya Powles, author of Small Bodies of Water

Jessica J. Lee is a bestselling British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children's book A Garden Called Home, co-author (with fieldnotes collective) of the collaborative work this too is a glistening, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted and the eco-poetry collection Tendrils. Her work has received numerous awards internationally, including the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction, a Banff Mountain Book Award, the Taiwan Open Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King's College. She lives in Berlin.