Double Book Launch

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, the Banff Mountain Book Award, and the RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. She is the author of nature writing books Turning, 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 is the founding editor of The Willowherb Review. She teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge and lives in Berlin.

A first-generation Hong Kong-Canadian writer, Isaac Yuen pens essays and short fiction that explores themes around nature, culture, and identity. He is the co-author of the award-winning Atlas der ungewöhnlichen Klänge: Eine Reise zu den akustischen Wunderdern unserer Erde with nature writer Michaela Vieser, and holds a Master’s in Environmental Education and Communication. A 2019 writer-in-residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation for Literature in Montricher, Switzerland, Isaac is currently a Fiction Meets Science Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Institute of Advanced Studies in Delmenhorst, Germany.

In Dispersals: on Plants, Borders, and Belonging, prize-winning memoirist and nature writer, Jessica Lee turns to the lives of plants entangled in our human world to explore belonging, displacement, identity, and the truths of our shared future.

Isaac Yuen’s Utter, Earth, Advice on Living in a More-than-Human World is a light, literary take on an animal book for grown-ups, a tongue-in-cheek self-help column with lessons drawn from nature, a sort of hitchhiker’s guide to the more-than-human world. It is a celebration, through wordplay and earthplay, of our planet’s riotous wonders.

On May 23rd Jessica and Isaac will be in conversation about their explorations of flora, fauna and their journeys to findings that remind us how inextricably bound to nature we are.

The event will take place at Lobe Block and is co-sponsored by the Embassy of Canada in Germany. There will be readings and discussions followed by an audience Q&A and book signing.

Books will be available for sale at the event, courtesy of the lovely Curious Fox!