Dispersals : 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