Who's going to win this year's Bad Sex Award?

[Dave Monroe]

Iain Hollingshead Wins Bad Sex Prize
- By JILL LAWLESS, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, November 29, 2006

(11-29) 11:38 PST LONDON, United Kingdom (AP) --

First-time author Iain Hollingshead scooped a dubious
literary honor Wednesday, winning the Bad Sex in
Fiction Award for his novel, "Twenty Something."

Hollingshead beat established writers including Booker
Prize nominee David Mitchell, best seller Mark Haddon
and literary maverick Thomas Pynchon to the prize,
which aims to skewer "the crude, tasteless, often
perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual
description in the modern novel."

Judges were moved by Hollingshead's evocation of "a
commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected
images and explosions of a million little particles."
His description of "bulging trousers" sealed the win,
the judges said.

"Because Hollingshead is a first-time writer, we
wished to discourage him from further attempts," the
judges — editors of Literary Review magazine — said in
a statement. "Heavyweights like Thomas Pynchon and
Will Self are beyond help at this point."

Hollingshead, 25, who received his award from rocker
Courtney Love at a London ceremony, said he was
delighted to become the prize's youngest winner.

"I hope to win it every year," said Hollingshead, who
receives a statuette and a bottle of champagne.

Now in its 14th year, the award was established by the
Literary Review to celebrate truly cringe-worthy
erotic writing.

"It's mixed metaphors, embarrassing fumbling. It's the
redundancy of the scene in an otherwise good novel,"
said assistant editor Philip Womack.

This year's runner-up was Tim Willcocks' medieval
action novel, "The Religion," for a scene in which
characters grapple passionately in a forge "across the
cold steel face of the anvil."

"In the pit of his stomach a cauldron boiled and some
seething and nameless brew rose up through his spine
and filled his brain with the Devil's Fire," Willcocks
writes.

Willcocks praised the Bad Sex prize as "a much better
guide to a good read than those purveyors of powerful
sleeping drugs, the Booker, the Pulitzer, the Goncourt
et. al."

Other finalists included Mitchell's 1980s
coming-of-age story, "Black Swan Green," for a passage
in which one character's breasts are compared to "a
pair of Danishes" and another's to "two Space
Hoppers."

Pynchon's long-awaited, 1,000-page novel, "Against the
Day," was nominated for a scene involving a spaniel
that ends: "Reader, she bit him."

Haddon, the best-selling author of "The Curious
Incident of the Dog in the Night-time," was
shortlisted for his description of rapture in his
latest novel, "A Spot of Bother": "Images went off in
her head like little fireworks. The smell of coconut.
Brass firedogs."

The other finalists were Scottish writer Irvine
Welsh's "Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs"; Julia
Glass'"The Whole World Over"; Michael Cannon's
"Lachlan's War"; "Tourism" by Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal;
and Self's "The Book of Dave."

Last year's winner was food critic and novelist Giles
Coren for a memorable passage comparing a male
character's genitalia to a shower hose. In 2004, the
prize went to Tom Wolfe's novel, "I Am Charlotte
Simmons," for sex scenes the judges called "ghastly
... inept ... (and) unrealistic."

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/11/29/entertainment/e113853S62.DTL

--- Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Who's going to win this year's Bad Sex Award?
> POSTED: 12:53 p.m. EST, November 29, 2006
>
>
http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/books/11/29/books.badsex.ap/index.html



 
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