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

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

A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; and those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being 'out of place'--weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.

A prize-winning memoirist and nature writer turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future A seed slips beyond a garden wall. A tree is planted on a precarious border. A shrub is stolen from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere? In fourteen essays, Dispersals explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds: from species considered invasive, like giant hogweed; to those vilified but intimate, like soy; and those like kelp, on which our futures depend. Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being 'out of place'--weeds, samples collected through imperial science, crops introduced and transformed by our hand. Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong, why both cross borders, and how our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.