Berlin-based author and environmental historian Jessica J. Lee has been named recipient of this year’s $10,000 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. As part of the prize purse, she will also receive mentorship from Kate Harris, who selected Lee for the honour.

In March, Harris won the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize for her travel memoir, Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road. In a press release, Harris says Lee is “definitely a non-fiction voice I want to hear more from.”

Lee’s 2017 debut book, Turning: A Year in the Water, is a memoir documenting the period during which she swam in a different lake every weekend as a means of coping with heartbreak and depression. She is also founder of the literary magazine The Willowherb Review, which publishes nature writing from emerging and established authors of colour. She received a BA from Halifax’s University of Kings College, an MA from University of London, and a Ph.D. in Environmental History and Aesthetics from Toronto’s York University. Lee is currently writer-in-residence at the Leibniz Institute for Freshwater Ecology.

The RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award provides recognition and assistance to a published Canadian author who is working on the first draft of a literary non-fiction writing project.