Bad Sex in Fiction Award excerpts: Morrissey leads 2015 nominations with cringeworthy List of the Lost sex scene
Britain's most dreaded literary prize returns, with the winner announced on Tuesday 1 December
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Your support makes all the difference.It’s that time of year again, when another batch of gloriously terrible literary sex scenes has the whole office giggling. The Bad Sex in Fiction Award is back and the nominations so far have been revealed, including Morrissey’s atrocious debut List of the Lost and a novel from George Pelecanos, screenwriter of The Wire.
Read the excerpts in the gallery below, at your peril
Britain’s most dreaded annual prize returns for a 23rd year to highlight the most egregiouss passage of sexual description in a work of fiction. The point of the prize is to draw readers’ attention to “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them”. Pornographic or expressly erotic literature is not covered, according to Literary Review.
Other authors in the running this year include Lauren Groff for Fates and Furies, Tomas Espedal for Against Nature and Aleksandar Hemon for The Making of Zombie Wars.
Unauthorised David Cameron biography Call Me Dave by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott came to the judges’ attention with its suggestion that “the future Prime Minister inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth” but was dismissed as “too flimsily correlated as to resemble fiction”. Essentially, it was too bad even for the Bad Sex awards.
Last year’s ‘accolade’ was won by Ben Okri for The Age of Magic. If you need a reminder of his dubious sexual writing, look no further:
When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight. He touched her belly and his hand seemed to burn through her. He lavished on her body indirect touches and bittersweet sensations flooded her brain.
The 2015 winner will be announced at a London ceremony on Tuesday 1 December.
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