Winner of The Bad Sex Award Announced

It wasn’t long ago that we brought you the finalists for the Literary Review Magazine’s Bad Sex Award with some of the most cringeworthy literary sex scenes vying for the dubious honour of being the worst piece of literary erotica released this year.

Sex is a notoriously difficult subject to get right when writing about it and there are plenty of books where I’ve lost interest in the entire story just because of the appalling sex scenes but I don’t think I have ever come across any that were quite as bad as these were. Here are a few examples that were in competition for the best worst sex scene and of course the winner of the Bad Sex Award for 2016.

From Janet Ellis’ The Butcher’s Hook

“When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine, rutted with bone like mud ridges in a dry field, to the audacious swell below.”

From Leave Me by Gayle Forman

“They were in that room, Jason had slammed the door and devoured her with his mouth, his hands, which were everywhere. As if he were ravenous. And she remembered standing in front of him, her dress a puddle on the floor, and how she’d started to shake, her knees knocking together, like she was a virgin, like this was the first time.”

But these are also rans, runners up, second best and losers; they pale into insignificance when in competition with phrases such as

“My prick was a plank stuck to her stomach,”

Can I get a collective gag please? No? Well how about

“With a swerve of her hips, she turned me over and I was on top of her … I was her plaything, which she moved around. Our sexes were ready, poised in expectation, barely touching each other: ballet dancers hovering en pointe.”

Yes these are the delectable snippets of erotica that have won first prize for Italian poet and translator Erri De Luca whose novel about a young orphan boy growing up in Naples The Day Before Happiness was considered to contain the best literary Bad Sex of 2016.

While these awards may appear to be churlish and even prudish they were never intended to discourage writing about sex, but to discourage writing about sex badly.

Auberon Waugh, the editor of the Literary Review in 1993 when the awards were conceived wrote in their mission statement that: the bash was to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”. 

Whatever the original aim of the Bad Sex Award this is one gong that we bet authors never want to be in receipt of.