Londoner's Diary
The race is on to save the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Traditionally given each year to the author of the worst depiction of sex in a novel, the award has been on hiatus for four years. It has been put in jeopardy by an apparent dearth of bad sex writing in recent literature.
We understand judges at the Literary Review magazine, which has run the award since 1993, are at their wits’ end and might scrap the award.
Founded by Auberon Waugh, journalist and son of Brideshead Revisited writer Evelyn Waugh, the Bad Sex Award’s purpose is to “highlight and gently discourage redundant, poorly written or unnecessarily pornographic descriptions of sex in fiction”.
The award ceremony is usually held in December at the appropriately named In And Out Club in St James’s Square, and the result makes waves in the literary world. But no booking has yet been made at the club this year.
There hasn’t been a Bad Sex Award since 2019 when the pandemic intervened and judges decided that the public had been “subjected to too many bad things”.
The Londoner thinks it is essential that this literary institution now comes back with a bang. We reckon with all the dross that gets published, there must be some awful passages of sex out there, certainly enough for a 2023 shortlist. Since the award was last given in 2019, all publications since 2020 could be eligible.
Honourable mentions
The judges usually stick to novels, but former prime minister Tony Blair nearly got a Bad Sex Award in 2010 for his memoir A Journey. The offending passage, about the night Labour leader John Smith died and he Blair decided to run to replace him: “That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told… I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct, knowing I would need every ounce of emotional power to cope with what lay ahead.”
Evening Standard columnist and novelist Rachel Johnson won the award in 2008 for her book Shire Hell. The judges homed in on this passage: “JM’s hands are caressing my breasts, now, and I am allowed to kiss him back, but not for very long, for he breaks off, to give each breast in turn the attention it deserves. His hands find my bush, and with light fingers he flutters about there, as if he is a moth caught inside a lampshade.”
Morrissey won in 2015 for his debut novel List of the Lost. Try putting this to music: “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.”
Do your bit to save the Bad Sex Award
Have you read a cringeworthy depiction of sex recently? Please send the author’s name, book title and offending passage to diary@standard.co.uk under the subject line ‘Bad Sex Award’ and we will get them to the judges.
