Bad Sex Lit Award

The official list is out.

Yet Barbara Kay is not one of the *winners*.

It's a shame, really. She should receive a life-long achievement award for bad sex writing in non-fiction.

Her arid, hectoring, astringent prose - which projects her deeply gynophobic fear and loathing of juicy, passionate, joyful women and the men who love them that way - is the very opposite of sex.

Rarely have I read such unbalanced and scolding screeds. Though misery loves company, I can't even imagine men who are drawn to Babs' particular brand of verbal abuse.

On the other hand, if one were contemplating entering a convent or a monastery, her turgid little pieces would certainly make life-long chastity and sexual abstinence appealing.

Bad(ly written) sex gets award.

A cringe-inducing passage in best-selling novel The Kindly Ones that compares a sexual encounter to a battle with an one-eyed Greek mythological monster has won Britain's Bad Sex in Fiction Prize.

The editors of the Literary Review magazine said that American author Jonathan Littell won the award for describing sex as "a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg."

From here.

Littell's novel which was originally published in French, won Le Prix Goncourt - a prestigious literary award - last year.

The Bad Sex In Fiction Award was picked up by his agent.

Perhaps they'll blame the translator? Telegraph blogger Oliver Marre has a different take on the award.

The Bad Sex Awards are – and always have been, really – about laughing at sex, not showing up bad writing. ...

There are two types of winner of the award: the big name literary writer on the one hand, and the English scribbler – who quite possibly, like last year’s winner Rachel Johnson – would be thrilled by the prize because, likely as not, her aim was to make people laugh and squirm in a very British way and laughing at sex was high in her armoury of methods. ...

Booker judge Lucasta Miller was interviewed about whether it’s difficult to writed about sex by the BBC and said metaphorical descriptions were “toe-curling”.

Writed? Shouldn't that, in the spirit of the award, be writhed?