Bad Sex “Wins” the Prize

The connection to crime fiction is tenuous at best, but I just can’t resist mentioning that the winner for what must be one of the least coveted of the literary awards has been announced.

The Literary Review cooked up the Bad Sex in Fiction Award 14 years ago in order to “draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it,” according to the Associated Press. That said, the 2006 field included some seriously heavy hitters, such as Booker-nominated David Mitchell for Black Swan Green (always a bridesmaid) and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day.

And the winner of this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award, announced during a ceremony in London, is ... Iain Hollingshead, for writing that appeared in his debut novel, Twentysomething. Appropriately enough, singer Courtney Love presented Hollingshead with his prize.

In a Los Angeles Times editorial, pop-culture watcher Meghan Daum manages to capture the news edge of this award as well as comment on the time and culture that produced it. Says Daum:

At 25, Hollingshead is the youngest author to win the award, edging out formidable competition such as the bestselling novelist Mark Haddon and the legendary tome-writer Thomas Pynchon, whose latest novel, Against the Day, includes a sex scene involving a dog that concludes with the sentence, “Reader, she bit him.” Another nominee was Booker Prize finalist David Mitchell, who was recognized for a short story in which a character’s breasts are likened to “a pair of Danishes.”

Hollingshead, for his part, clinched his victory with passages pertaining to “bulging trousers” and “a commotion of grunts and squeaks.” Host Courtney Love presented the prize--a bottle of champagne and, according to British newspaper descriptions, a “semi-abstract” statuette.

The AP item can be viewed here. Don’t miss Daum’s L.A. Times piece here.