Dispersals

Author: Jessica J. Lee

Format: Paperback

On Plants, Borders and Belonging

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

About the Author

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of Turning, Two Trees Make a Forest, Dispersals, children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King's College. She lives in Berlin.

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