Man Booker Prize for Fiction joins forces with the Woodland Trust

http://www.themanbookerprize.com/

Literary luminaries associated with The Man Booker Prize for Fiction are today (31 March) planting an avenue of native oak trees as a symbolic gesture to compensate for the trees felled in order to produce the hundred-plus books submitted for the prize each year.

Judges of the 2008 Prize are planting 13 saplings in the Woodland Trust’s new woodland site at Theydon Bois in Essex as a living commemoration of the ‘Booker Dozen’ - the 13 titles chosen for that year’s longlist.
Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes, is joined by 2008 Man Booker Prize Judges including Michael Portillo, former MP, Cabinet Minister and the 2008 Chair of Judges; Alex Clark, literary journalist and Louise Doughty, novelist.

The collaboration came about after the 2008 judges decided they would like to replenish some of the trees cut down to produce the many novels submitted for the prize. A hundred and twelve novels were submitted that year, and it seemed only fitting to give something back.

Theydon Bois, a 97-acre site where thousands of native broadleaf trees have been planted since the Trust acquired it in 1997, is close to Epping Forest – indeed was probably once a part of that huge hunting forest - and is the penultimate stop on the Central tube line.