Jessica J. Lee

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author, environmental historian, and winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature, a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award.

She is the author of three books of nature writing, Turning, national bestseller Two Trees Make a Forest, and Dispersals, the children’s book A Garden Called Home, and co-editor of the essay collection Dog Hearted. She has a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics and was Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin from 2017–2018. Jessica is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review and teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College. She lives in Berlin.

Jessica spent a week in the summer of 2025 taking in the sights and sounds of IISD Experimental Lakes Area as well as researching for an upcoming book. More on that to come…

Discover Jessica’s bibliography here.

“I began work as a nature writer at the end of my PhD and became passionate about communicating the work of researchers—especially historians and scientists—to a wider audience. My previous works have variously focussed on lakes, Taiwan, plant/botanical histories and invasion ecology, and draw deeply on my own training as an environmental historian.”