Bad sex – for this they give an award?

Yes, and it’s given to authors!  England’s Literary Review has been giving the Bad Sex in Fiction Award for several years, and it isn’t the kind of trophy for which you’re likely to be lionized.

It is hard…damn! I meant to say difficult – to write about the awards without lapsing into double entendre, and as one reads about them the mind teems with sophomoric jokes and snigger-inducing puns. For instance, Guardian.co.uk‘s headline is “Alastair Campbell outlasts Tony Blair in bad sex awards. Former spin doctor beats off stiff competition from ex-PM to reach shortlist for prize honouring clumsy prose about coitus.” And surely someone with a schoolboy prankster’s sense of humor booked the venue for presentation of the award at the In & Out Club in St James’s Square.

We can’t even discuss how the awards were conceived – see what I mean? – without smirking. But let’s try. Ironically,” we read in a posting in The Independent by Arifa Akbar, ” the bad sex awards were originally conceived, in 1993, to celebrate good sex, before the editor, Auberon Waugh, was advised by co-founder, Rhoda Koenig, that this might be ‘less interesting’ than plucking out the clichéd and the corny. Waugh went with her suggestion. ‘For something like 15 years I had to review a novel a week in various publications,’ he explained in an article for The Erotic Review, “and bit by bit I noticed how practically every novelist had taken to including a sex scene which had nothing to do with the plot and added nothing to the enjoyment of the narrative. Nobody could possibly have been aroused by these awkward, perfunctory couplings.”

For some witty and insightful articles from the British viewpoint about sex in literature, read  Bad sex please, we’re British: Can fictive sex ever have artistic merit? and Is it Difficult to Write Well about Sex?

The nominees for the 2010 are as follows (the publishers listed are British):

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (4th Estate)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Atlantic Books)
The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon (Atlantic Books)
Maya by Alastair Campbell (Hutchinson)
A Life Apart by Neel Mukherjee (Constable & Robinson)
Heartbreak by Craig Raine (Atlantic Books)
The Shape of Her by Rowan Somerville (W&N)
Mr Peanut by Adam Ross (Jonathan Cape).

We don’t yet have the offending passages nominated for this year’s prize but here they are for 2009: extracts from the 2009 prize shortlist. Please let’s not all groan at once.

Ironically, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was not nominated for a National Book Award but it is a candidate for a Bad Sex one. Will he attend the award ceremony?  Has he prepared an acceptance speech?

Richard Curtis