Jessica J. Lee – författare

HIGHLY COMMENDED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR NATURE WRITING 2024LONGLISTED 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 A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worldsA seed slips beyond a garden wall. A seaweed drifts through an ocean. A tree is planted on a shifting border. A shrub is uprooted from its culture and its land. What happens when these plants leave their original homes and put down roots elsewhere?Born in Canada to a Taiwanese mother and a Welsh father, steeped in both literary and scientific traditions, Jessica J. Lee is a perfectly placed observer of our world in motion.In this vibrant book of linked essays she explores the entanglements of the plant and human worlds, and the echoes and counterpoints she detects in the migration of plants and people - and the language we use to describe them.Each of the plants considered in this collection are somehow perceived as being "out of place"- whether weeds, samples collected through imperial science, or crops introduced and transformed by our hand.Combining memoir, history, and scientific research in precise and poetic prose, Jessica J. Lee meditates on the question of how both plants and people come to belong - or not - as they border cross, and reveals how all our futures are more entwined than we might imagine.'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 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE INDIE BOOK AWARDS 2025SHORTLISTED FOR THE ASLE-UKI BOOK PRIZE 2025LONGLISTED 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 AbandonmentBorn 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

'The water slips over me like cool silk. The intimacy of touch uninhibited, rising around my legs, over my waist, up to my collarbone. When I throw back my head and relax, the lake runs into my ears. The sound of it is a muffled roar, the vibration of the body amplified by water, every sound felt as if in slow motion . . .' Summer swimming . . . but Jessica Lee - Canadian, Chinese and British - swims through all four seasons and especially loves the winter. 'I long for the ice. The sharp cut of freezing water on my feet. The immeasurable black of the lake at its coldest. Swimming then means cold, and pain, and elation.'At the age of twenty-eight, Jessica Lee, who grew up in Canada and lived in London, finds herself in Berlin. Alone. Lonely, with lowered spirits thanks to some family history and a broken heart, she is there, ostensibly, to write a thesis. And though that is what she does daily, what increasingly occupies her is swimming. So she makes a decision that she believes will win her back her confidence and independence: she will swim fifty-two of the lakes around Berlin, no matter what the weather or season. She is aware that this particular landscape is not without its own ghosts and history.This is the story of a beautiful obsession: of the thrill of a still, turquoise lake, of cracking the ice before submerging, of floating under blue skies, of tangled weeds and murkiness, of cool, fresh, spring swimming - of facing past fears of near drowning and of breaking free.When she completes her year of swimming Jessica finds she has new strength, and she has also found friends and has gained some understanding of how the landscape both haunts and holds us.This book is for everyone who loves swimming, who wishes they could push themselves beyond caution, who understands the deep pleasure of using their body's strength, who knows what it is to allow oneself to abandon all thought and float home to the surface.

I have learned many words for 'island': isle, atoll, eyot, islet, or skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and always, by definition, I have understood them by their relation to water. But the Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilisation grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better analogue: (dao, 'island') built from the relationship between earth and sky.Between tectonic plates and conflicting cultures, Taiwan is an island of extremes: high mountains, exposed flatlands, thick forests. After unearthing a hidden memoir of her grandfather's life, written on the cusp of his total memory loss, Jessica J Lee hunts his story, in parallel with exploring Taiwan, hoping to understand the quakes that brought her family from China, to Taiwan and Canada, and the ways in which our human stories are interlaced with geographical forces. Part-nature writing, part-biography, Two Trees Make a Forest traces the natural and human stories that shaped an island and a family.