Jessica J. Lee

Jessica J. Lee is a British-Canadian-Taiwanese author and environmental historian. She writes about nature, place, and identity. She is best known for her memoir Two Trees Make a Forest (2019), which won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

Lee was born in Canada to a Welsh father and a Taiwanese mother. She grew up in Canada and later lived in London and Berlin. She earned a BA from the University of King's College in Halifax and an MA from the University of London. She then completed a PhD in Environmental History and Aesthetics at York University.

In 2017, she became the Writer-in-Residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded The Willowherb Review, a nonfiction journal that supports diverse voices in nature writing. The project ran for five issues and ended in 2022. It was supported by Arts Council England and crowdfunding.

Her debut book, Turning (2017), explores swimming in Berlin's lakes and personal transformation. In 2019, Two Trees Make a Forest was published. It blends environmental history with her journey to Taiwan, tracing her family's roots. The book won several awards, including the Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature and a Banff Mountain Book Award.

Lee’s later works include Dispersals and the children’s book A Garden Called Home. She also co-edited Dog Hearted, an essay collection. She won the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award in 2019, receiving mentorship from Kate Harris.

She taught at the University of Cambridge and is now the Course Director of the Granta Nature Writing Workshop. She also mentors MFA students at the University of King’s College. Lee is a freelance editor and tutor who specialises in helping non-native English speakers. She has led workshops in Germany, the UK, Norway, the US, and Canada.

Jessica J. Lee lives in Berlin.

Photo credit: Ricardo A. Rivas