It’s that time of year. This week we will learn the winner of the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, now in its 13th year in the UK. The prize focuses on literary fiction – this year’s finalists include John Updike, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez – and its stated goal 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.”
This must be the easiest award to…award…on the planet, since it’s difficult to think of a well-written sex scene, no? Perhaps they should also try to find a good one worth rewarding, otherwise the general rule shouldn’t be “Write good sex scenes,” but rather “Don’t write sex scenes.”
If you’re interested in reading this year’s nominated excerpts (the “long list,” which somehow sounds different when it’s said about the Booker Prize or the National Book Award), go here. If you’re interested in reading about the award more generally, go to this article, which suggests there should be another award given every year: Least Inspired Headline About the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award. (I’m not saying I did any better.)
If you want my opinion – and yes, I read the nominees; it was for research! – I have to give my vote to Giles Coren for the passage from Winkler. (“Like Zorro.” One could write for decades and not match the profundity of it.) Please, though, don’t let the kids read it. Or even most adults. Not because it’s filthy, though it is, but because it will ingrain bad writing habits.
One last weird note: One of the chosen novels is titled The Olive Readers. This blog wants to make clear that it has no vested interest in seeing that book win, though if it does, and we accidentally get increased traffic because of it, well: Welcome, perverts. You should be ashamed you ever learned to Google.
[EV: One of my books is on this list. All publicity is good publicity, right?]
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