Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Cringe Worthy

Rowan Somerville, the Irish author, has narrowly beaten the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell to win this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.  Somerville was crowned overall winner of the prize, which celebrates crude or outlandish sexual passages in modern literature, for his second novel, The Shape of Her.

The judges said they were particularly taken with the sentence: “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”  Other amorous passages contained a female body part “upturned like the nose of the loveliest nocturnal animal, sniffing the night” and described how one character “twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself”.  Somerville said:

“What an honour to share a list with Jonathan Franzen and Christos Tsiolkas. There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation I would like to thank you.”

Other previous winners have included the novelists Norman Mailer, Sabastian Faulks and Tom Wolfe.

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