An “ecstatic” love scene featuring a stray rocket going off somewhere in the night has earned Ben Okri, winner of several prestigious literary awards, a more ambiguous trophy – the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.

The Age of Magic, Okri’s 10th novel, follows a team of filmmakers, shooting a documentary about the idea of Arcadia, who wind up in a hotel by a lake in the shadow of a looming mountain. The 1991 Booker winner scooped the prize for a love scene involving Lao, the film’s presenter, and Mistletoe, his girlfriend.

“When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight. He touched her belly and his hand seemed to burn through her. He lavished on her body indirect touches and bitter-sweet sensations flooded her brain. She became aware of places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour.

“Adrift on warm currents, no longer of this world, she became aware of him gliding into her. He loved her with gentleness and strength, stroking her neck, praising her face with his hands, till she was broken up and began a low rhythmic wail … The universe was in her and with each movement it unfolded to her. Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off.”

Okri won the Booker in 1991 for The Famished Road and has received, among other prizes, the Commonwealth Writers’ prize, the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the Guardian Fiction prize. Unable to attend, he issued a terse and less than ecstatic statement: “A writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it.”

Laura Palmer, editorial director of Head of Zeus, accepting the award on his behalf was more chipper: “This completes every start-up publisher’s dream hat-trick: Head of Zeus have now won a Political Book award, the Metadata Gold Standard award, and the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award all in a single year.”

Okri’s editor, Maggie McKernan, said: “Winning the award is fun but a bit undignified, just like sex, assuming you do it properly.”

Okri prevailed in a shortlist of distinguished authors. The winner of this year’s Booker, Richard Flanagan, with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, was a contender with: “Hands found flesh; flesh, flesh. He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world.”

Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage resorted to naturalistic metaphors: “Shiro’s were small, but her nipples were as hard as tiny round pebbles. Their pubic hair was as wet as a rain forest. Their breath mingled with his, becoming one, like currents from far away, secretly overlapping at the dark bottom of the sea.”

Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen weighed in with: “He hears himself gasp in wonder. He falls into an ecstatic burning harmedness, losing, lost, unmade. And is finished.”

Veteran novelist Wilbur Smith, was nominated for his novel Desert God, in which a woman’s knee-length glowing hair “did not cover her breasts which thrust their way through it like living creatures. They were perfect rounds, white as mare’s milk and tipped with ruby nipples that puckered as my gaze passed over them”.

Jonathan Beckman, a senior editor at the magazine described the shortlist as the strongest of recent years.

“Flanagan swaddles the encounter in so many abstract nouns that the whole experience becomes very obscure and desexualised. The Murakami seems weirdly frictionless, an opportunity for metaphor-making above anything else,” he said before Wednesday night’s ceremony at the In & Out (Naval & Military) Club in St James’s Square. The prize was presented by the Reverend Richard Coles, former member of chart-topping band The Communards, presenter of Saturday Live and latterly a Church of England priest. Last year the award went to Manil Suri for The City of Devi.

Established in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, the purpose of the prize is to draw attention to what judges regard as poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them. Other former winners include Norman Mailer, AA Gill and Rachel Johnson.