Dispersals - On Plants, Borders and Belonging. A poetic and intimate essay collection on the lives of plants and their entanglement with our human worlds

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