Today’s ‘List Friday’. Literary Review is a British literary magazine founded in 1979 [1]. Though apparently the UK’s principal literary monthly, it’s perhaps best known for its annual ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’. Each year since 1993, it’s presented the Award to the writer it considers has produced the worst description of a sex scene in a novel. The Award’s stated rationale is ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it’. Today’s list is the winners of the ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’ 1993-2010 [2]. I’ve heard of only a few of these 18 writers – who include, tellingly, only two women. Judges decide the award’s winner each year from among the nominees – of whom in 2010 there were eight [3]. The 2010 winner’s English writer Rowan Somerville (pictured) [4] for passages from his second novel, The Shape of Her [5]. I’m no literary maven; but I think Somerville’s a worthy winner. Here are the prize-winning passages [6]. Do you agree with me? During the late November Award presentation – at the aptly nicknamed In and Out Club in Piccadilly [7] – Somerville said ‘There is nothing more English than bad sex. So on behalf of the nation, I thank you’. The judges felt Campbell’s public enthusiasm for winning the Award wasn’t in keeping with the Award’s aim [8]. Meanwhile on salon.com Laura Miller deprecated the Award [9]. Ho hum.
1 comment:
OH DEAR, writing about sex rarely lives up to the act as sadly does not the act itself.
Each species procreates, whhich basically is all you can ask for; capturing th elusive quality of good sex is very hard.
It is at once a banal experience and an absolutely indescribale moment.
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