Singer responds for the first time to his triumph in the annual prize, which recognised his novel List of the Lost for a passage about a ‘bulbous salutation’

Morrissey has finally responded to his triumph in the Bad Sex award earlier this month – and the singer is not impressed.

The Literary Review announced on 1 December that the former Smiths singer’s debut novel, List of the Lost, had won the least coveted honour in fiction, the Bad Sex award, for a passage which includes references to a “giggling snowball of full-figured copulation” and a “dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation”, as well as the “the pained frenzy” of a “bulbous salutation”.

The annual prize is intended to highlight, and hence discourage, “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”.

Morrissey did not attend the ceremony due to touring commitments, and was unavailable for comment on the night. He told the Uruguayan paper El Observador this week that he felt it was “best to maintain an indifferent distance” from the prize, “because there are too many good things in life to let these repulsive horrors pull you down”.

“I have many enemies,” he added, “and their biggest motivation, as you know, is to try to use all your achievements against you.”

The singer is not the first writer to be less than impressed with winning the Bad Sex prize. Sebastian Faulks declined to collect his award in person in 1998, as did Tom Wolfe in 2004. Last year, Ben Okri also failed to attend the ceremony, issuing a statement in which he said merely that “a writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it”.

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Rowan Somerville, who won in 2010 for his novel The Shape of Her, wrote at the time that it had been “a hard pill to swallow”, because “it takes years to write a novel and, if you are serious about what you do, quite a lot of sacrifice”.

“There’s an atmosphere of bullying peculiar to public schools about the whole thing. If you decline to show up, like the excellent Sebastian Faulks, they harangue you for years,” he wrote in the Guardian. So Somerville attended, and heard passages from his novel read out “with leering innuendo”.

“My novel has lots of sex in it because it is about sex. Its real title was Sex That Lasts for Years, but the publishers wouldn’t allow it. Despite appearing to be a love story, it’s really about how the scars of childhood abuse affect later relationships and it’s based on two people’s real experience – so it’s been quite hard to see lines wrenched out of context and picked up by the press around the world,” he wrote.

But despite having plans to tell the audience “what a travesty” the prize is, he ended up smiling, and accepting it, saying: “There’s nothing more English than bad sex, so on behalf of a nation, I thank you.”