Press Release
'An Everlasting Story'
31 March 2009
Man Book Prize for Fiction judges plant oak trees with the Woodland Trust.
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; Louise Doughty, novelist and Hardeep Singh Kohli, TV and radio broadcaster.
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.
Ion Trewin comments, 'I can't think of a more fitting way of putting something back. I hope this planting of a grove of trees might prove an annual event leading ultimately to a wood, even a Man Booker forest.'
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.
Laura Judson, Head of Regional Development at the Woodland Trust, comments, "We are only too pleased to host such a symbolic planting ceremony so close to the centre of London. There is no better way to illustrate the direct connection between the vast amount of print material consumed in the name of literature and the raw materials required to produce it, not to mention the huge importance of tree planting in one of the least forested countries in Europe."
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Woodland Trust
