Man Booker Prize for Fiction judges plant new trees with the Woodland Trust

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The 2009 judges of The Man Booker Prize for Fiction are today (16 March) planting an open book of Scots pine trees in Heartwood Forest - an 850 acre Hertfordshire site set to become England’s largest new native forest.

For the second year running, the Man Booker Prize is collaborating with the Woodland Trust over this symbolic gesture to compensate for the trees felled in order to produce the hundred-plus books submitted for the prize each year.

The judges are planting 13 Scots pine saplings in the Trust’s woodland site near St Albans in Hertfordshire as a living commemoration of the ‘Booker Dozen’ - the 13 titles chosen for that year’s longlist from which Hilary Mantel’s novel Wolf Hall was chosen as winner.

Ion Trewin, Literary Director of the Man Booker Prizes joined the judges - broadcaster and author James Naughtie (Chair); biographer and critic, Lucasta Miller; Literary Editor of The Sunday Telegraph, Michael Prodger; academic and author, Professor John Mullan and comedian and broadcaster, Sue Perkins.