Dispersals

HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024
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