UPDATE: Sept 2015

Check out this video from Magic Oxygen Publishing showing what they did after their literary competition:

Original article: June 2014

Magic Oxygen Publishing, an environmental, green publishing house based in Dorset, has recently announced that it will be introducing a unique Literary Prize. Short stories and poetry are eligible for submission, and the winner in each category will win £1,000.

Moreover, Magic Oxygen has tied its environmental policies to the competition; a tree will be planted in Kenya for every single entry received, and entrants will even receive the GPS coordinates for their tree! All short-listed entries will also be put into an anthology.

To ensure the project succeeds, Magic Oxygen has joined forces with Ru Hartwell, who has been involved in planting projects throughout the world. Ru, who will coordinate the tree planting for Magic Oxygen, will plant the trees together near the Kundeni School in Bore, Kenya. Specific types of trees have been chosen as they are usually grown for their timber; ultimately Magic Oxygen and Ru hope that this will help the local population enter an already booming market.

Ru Hartwell explains: ‘It is quite dry up there so they will be particularly drought resistant types like neem, gmelina and casuarina. By growing trees that are needed at the coast, we aim to help the community share in the boom, which needless to say, they are largely excluded from at the moment. After only 3 years a casuarina roofing pole can be sold locally for over £10! They have to pay a fair bit in transport but there is a ready market for this type of timber, partly because there is so little of their original forest left.”

Magic Oxygen were originally founded with strong green ethics: all of their staff and visitors are provided with organic, Fairtrade food and drinks, and their office is ran on Good Energy, a company that gets 100% of its electricity from sunshine, wind and rain. It is hoped that the new Literary Prize will bring a new dimension to Magic Oxygen’s green policies, by ultimately creating a whole forest rooted in a love of words and a commitment to the environment.

The Literary Prize (referred to as #MOLP) is open for entries on July 1st at 12 noon GMT.

Watch their video below:

For more information, please visit: www.magicoxygen.co.uk/2014/06/literary-competition-planting

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