Irish author wins 'bad sex' award

AN IRISH AUTHOR has earned the dubious honour of receiving the the Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award.

Rowan Somerville’s novel The Shape of Her caught the eye of judges searching for a worthy recipient of this year’s award – which was established in 1993 by the late Auberon Waugh and celebrates crude, tasteless or plain absurd descriptions of sex in literature.

The one line that particularly captivated this year’s judges read:

Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her.

Somerville told the Irish Times: “It’s a very Zen prize because to win is to lose”.

This year, the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also received a nomination for the prize – a highly unusual development as his book, A Journey, is actually an autobiography. Judges considered breaking the rules to accept Blair into the running for his description of a dalliance with his wife, of which he wrote: “I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct. ”

The judges decided in the end that Blair’s description was too brief to merit an award – however one of the judges, Jonathan Beckman, said Blair’s zoomorphic description of himself was “grim”.

Other works considered for this year’s award include Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom and former spin doctor Alastair Campbell’s novel Maya.