IRISH WRITER ROWAN Somerville beat strong competition on Monday night to win the Literary Review magazine’s Bad Sex in Fiction award for his latest novel The Shape of Her.
The highlights of the eight-book shortlist included American writer Jonathan Franzen’s literary bestseller Freedom, Booker longlisted The Slap by Australian author Christos Tsiolkas, Kolkata-born Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart and Labour party spin doctor Alastair Campbell’s novel Maya.
The remaining books in the shortlist were The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, Heartbreak by Craig Raine and Mr Peanut by Adam Ross.
The award was presented to Somerville on Monday night during a ceremony at London’s In & Out Club by film director Michael Winner. Accepting the award, Somerville said: “There is nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of the entire nation, I thank you.”
Somerville beat competition to win the award as judges highlighted lines from his books, “She released his hair from her fingers and twisted onto her belly like a fish flipping itself,” and “Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.”
The Bad Sex in Fiction award was set up by British writer and journalist Auberon Waugh, son of novelist Evelyn Waugh, during his stint as the editor of Literary Review in 1993. The award was set up “with the aim of gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels.”
American writer John