List: 'Good Sex Award'

Today’s ‘List Friday’. Last 10 December I devoted the List Friday post to the ‘Bad Sex in Fiction Award’ [1]. In that post I noted that on salon.com Laura Miller (pictured) [2] deprecated the Award. In her 30 November salon piece titled ‘No sex, please, we’re literary!’, she wrote ‘…the only antidote to the smirking crypto-priggishness of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award and its ilk: forthright praise for the literary sex writing that does work’ [3]. In response to salon readers’ feedback on Miller’s piece, eight days ago Miller announced salon’s ‘Good Sex Award’ [4]. The methodology’s sus, to say the least: Miller asked her friends to nominate their favorite passages about sex in novels published in 2010. The selections had to be the best-written, most interesting and most convincing pieces of sex writing. Miller whittled the responses down to eight which four judges, including Miller, ranked. Here’s are the eight in ranked order [5]. And here are the judges’ thoughts on ‘What makes a good sex scene?’ [6]. Methinks it’s all quite subjective. For example Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is on the shortlist for the 2010 ‘Bad Sex Award’ [7] yet it was runner-up in the 2011 ‘Good Sex Award’. Ho hum.
P.S. salon’s inviting its readers to send in their nominations for the 2012 ‘Good Sex Award’. That’s more democratic than nominations being submitted only by Miller’s friends.

List: 'Bad Sex in Fiction Award winners 1993-2010'

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.