Bad Sex in Fiction Prize

The Literary Review has awarded the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize annually to the serious novel featuring the most "inept, embarrassing and unnecessary" sex scenes. A panel of judges announces five nominees, then names the winner at a ceremony sponsored by the magazine. The Literary Review's editor Auberon Waugh (son of Evelyn Waugh), notes that "Judging is always highly amusing." Since the Prize's inception in 1993, winners have included Lord Bragg, Sebastian Faulks, A.A. Gill, Nicholas Royle and Sean Thomas.

PAST WINNERS

1994 - Philip Hook, The Stonebreakers
1995 - Philip Kerr, Gridiron
1996 - David Huggins, The Big Kiss: An Arcade Mystery
1997 - Nicholas Royle, The Matter of the Heart
1998 - Sebastian Faulks, Charlotte Gray
1999 - A. A. Gill, Starcrossed
2000 - Sean Thomas, Kissing England
2001 - Christopher Hart, Rescue Me

2000 ARTICLES

The Literary Review has named this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize nominees. Brian O'Doherty made the short list for his debut novel The Deposition of Father McGreevy, which features scenes of a man having sex with sheep and which previously garnered a nomination for the prestigious Booker Prize. The judges cited this noteworthy passage: "When I passed him he turned to look at me, and I saw those fine white lashes long enough to catch flies. Strange that a beast should have such beautiful lashes around eyes with as much expression as two marbles." While some writers and publishers dread the Bad Sex nominations, O'Doherty's publisher gushed, "It's great news, isn't it? I think he'll be absolutely delighted. We've already distributed 12,000 copies in England and Ireland, and this should sell a lot more of them. You know some Kerry councillor was so outraged he has declared a sort of fatwa on him? This should really get them going." Also receiving nominations: Sean Thomas, Kissing Engla; Wendy Perriam, Lying; Candida Clark, The Constant Eye; Edward St Aubyn, A Clue To The Exit; Wendy Holden, Bad Heir Day; and John Updike, Gertrude and Claudius.
The Guardian (Nov 2000)

The Literary Review has awarded this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize to Sean Thomas for his novel Kissing England. The panel of judges cited the passage in which the narrator sleeps with his "schoolgirl chick" girlfriend Katy: "Now. Yes. Brupt, he rises, turns her over, flips her white body. Her small white body. She is so small and so compact, and yet she has all the necessary features ... Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman, thou are more compact and more ... She is his own Toshiba, his dinky little JVC, his sweet Aiwa. 'Aiwa,' she say as he enters her, 'Aiwa, aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwa aiwaaaaaaaahhh.'" Unlike some previous winners who became petulant, Thomas accepted the prize in high spirits: "It's an enormous honour and I'm gratified." (More here.)
Ananova |
The Guardian (Nov 2000)

2001 ARTICLES

The winner of the 2001 Bad Sex in Fiction Award was announced last night at the annual award ceremony. The Literary Review awards the Bad Sex in Fiction Prize annually to the serious novel featuring the most "inept, embarrassing and unnecessary" sex scenes. The Review's founder, Auberon Waugh (who died earlier this year), created the award "to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it." The Independent notes, "So successful has the award become that many contemporary writers cannot embark on a scene of erotic description without feeling Waugh's sternly disapproving gaze behind their shoulder." Christopher Hart "won" this year's prize for his novel Rescue Me, which the author describes at Amazon.co.uk as a "sexy, sassy romantic comedy" in which an unemployed young man becomes a gigolo. The Literary Review cited this polar expedition-themed passage from Rescue Me: "Her hand is moving away from my knee and heading north. Heading unnervingly and with a steely will towards the pole. And, like Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Pamela will not easily be discouraged. I try twitching, and then shaking my leg, but to no avail. At last, disastrously, I try squeezing her hand painfully between my bony thighs, but this only serves to inflame her ardour the more. Ever northward moves her hand, while she smiles languorously at my right ear. And when she reaches the north pole, I think in wonder and terror, 'Oh, she will surely want to pitch her tent'."
The Independent | BBC | Amazon.co.uk (Dec 2001)

Taking a cue from the annual British Bad Sex in Fiction Prize, a Canadian columnist, novelist and publisher seek out the worst sex scenes of all time in Canadian literature. The panel chooses this passage from singer-songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers:

Oh what a greasy tower he there massaged! . . . His right hand beneath the steering wheel, urging, urging, he seemed to be pulling himself into the far black harbour like a reflexive stevedore. . . . F's eyes closed suddenly as if they had been squirted with lemon. . . . I feared for the organ, feared and coveted it, so hard it gleamed, streamlined as a Brancusi, the swelled head red and hot as a radioactive fireman's helmet. . . . Kamikaze insects splashed against the glass. . . . Thus we existed in some eye for a second: two men in a hurtling steel shell aimed at Ottawa, blinded by a mechanical mounting ecstasy, the old Indian land sunk in soot behind us, two swelling pricks pointing at eternity, two naked capsules filled with lonely tear gas to stop the riot in our brains. . . .

Is this really so bad? The prose style is breathless, over-the-top and preposterous, with quirky images clashing from sentence to sentence (stevedore, Brancusi, fireman's helmet, kamikaze, Indian land, tear gas), but what's wrong with that exactly? Descriptions of sex acts can easily veer into the ridiculous even when the writer tries to be discreet, so why not just embrace that ridiculousness? This passage isn't brilliant writing, but at least it's funny and original — far more entertaining than the countless bland "he entered her slowly" passages the panel could have cited. The columnist criticizes Cohen's "mixed metaphors" and "pretentious and clichéd stream-of-consciousness writing." Among journalists and academics, "pretentious" is often a snarky synonym for "ambitious," an easy slap at artistic risk-taking by those who've shunned any attempt at taking such risks. At the end of the article, the panel's novelist, Susan Swan, takes up this challenge: "If my passages slip through the ice, I'll happily offer them up to the next jury on bad writing about sex. Literature is about truth and going after truth involves the courage to be foolish." Bravo.

Metafilter has a discussion thread about this story, mostly devoted to defending the good name of Leonard Cohen. And at Mouth Organ, Todd Belton eloquently expressed similar sentiments about the Bad Sex in Fiction awards a while back.
Globe and Mail | Metafilter | Mouth Organ (Jan 2002)

2002 ARTICLES

The nominations have been announced for this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award. This Times article mentions only one of the ten nominated novels, The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru, which was cited in part for this passage:

His head has been pushed down into the dusty bedclothes, so he cannot see the purple face of the man toiling behind him. He is aware, however, that the pounding is punctuated by buttock-slaps and regular full-throated hunting cries. As the major’s excitement mounts, ‘Tally-ho!’ gives way to ‘On! On! On!’, and the bed groans with the effort of maintaining its structural integrity.

So what's so "bad" about that, either as sex or fiction? Last year around this time, Todd at Mouth Organ expressed his annoyance at the BSiFA's "demonization of erotica just to get a few laughs." What he said. More about the BSiFA from previous years. . . . UPDATE: This BBC article mentions some (but not all) of the other writers on the 2002 short list: Will Self, John Banville, Nicholas Coleridge, Nicola Barker and Ethan Hawke. (Nov 2002) ~~

Wendy Perriam won this year's Bad Sex in Fiction Award for her novel Tread Softly. More and more. In the cited passage, the main character fantasizes about her foot surgeon while having sex with her husband.

She lay back on the bed while he positioned himself above her, then she slid her feet up his chest and on to his shoulders - Mr Hughes's shoulders. She closed her eyes, saw his dark-as-treacle-toffee eyes gazing down at her. Weirdly, he was clad in pin-stripes at the same time as being naked. Pin-stripes were erotic, the uniform of fathers, two-dimensional fathers. Even Mr Hughes's penis had a seductive pin-striped foreskin. Enticingly rough yet soft inside her. The jargon he'd used at the consultation had become bewitching love-talk: '. . . dislocation of the second MTPJ . . . titanium hemi-implant . . . '

'Yes!' she whispered back. 'Dorsal subluxation . . . flexion deformity of the first metatarsal . . . '

They were building up a rhythm, an electrifying rhythm - long, fierce, sliding strokes, interspersed with gasping cries.

'Wait,' Ralph panted. 'let's do it the other way.' Swiftly he withdrew, arranged her on her hands and knees and knelt above her on the bed. It was even better that way - tighter, more exciting. She cupped his pin-striped balls, felt him thrust more urgently in response.