Years after gaining notoriety for embellishing parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces, the US author James Frey has a new notch in his bedpost: the 2018 bad sex in fiction award.

Seeing off competition from an all-male shortlist that included Haruki Murakami and the Man Booker prize-nominated Gerard Woodward, Frey won for his novel Katerina, a “fictional retelling” of a love affair the author started while on a hedonistic trip to France in the 1990s. The story follows Jay, a young American would-be writer, as he drinks and bonks his way around Paris, particularly with a Norwegian model named Katerina.

The award’s judges at the Literary Review said they had been swayed by several sex scenes in the novel, which include encounters in a car park and in the back of a taxi, but were especially convinced by an extended scene in a Paris bathroom between Jay and Katerina that features eight references to ejaculate.

“Blinding breathless shaking overwhelming exploding white God I cum inside her my cock throbbing we’re both moaning eyes hearts souls bodies one,” Frey writes. “One. White. God. Cum. Cum. Cum. I close my eyes let out my breath. Cum. I lean against her both breathing hard I’m still inside her smiling. She takes my hands lifts them and places them around her body, she puts her arms around me, we stay still and breathe, hard inside her, tight and warm and wet around me, we breathe. She gently pushes me away, we look into each other’s eyes, she smiles.”

After “days of debate”, the judges decided to give the dubious honour to Frey because “the Norwegian model left them unconvinced and the hard withdrawal was too much for them to bear”.

The judges said: “Frey prevailed against a strong all-male shortlist by virtue of the sheer number and length of dubious erotic passages in his book. The multiple scenes of sustained fantasy in Katerina could have won Frey the award many times over.”

Responding to his win, the author said: “I am deeply honoured and humbled to receive this prestigious award. Kudos to all my distinguished fellow finalists – you have all provided me with many hours of enjoyable reading over the last year.”

Frey, who shot to fame with his 2004 memoir about his drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces, and later became even more famous when the book was proved to contain embellishments, has been nominated for the bad sex award before, in 2011 for his novel The Final Testament of the Holy Bible.

Among the other shortlisted titles this year were Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (“I slipped my erect penis inside. Or, from another angle, that part of her actively swallowed my penis, immersing it in what felt like warm butter”); Woodward for The Paper Lovers (“Beneath them her wetness met his own wetness, and they stirred against each other, she pestled him slowly, until miraculously he found himself rigid again, as though he had risen out of his own pain, fresh and ready”); and Scoundrels by Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan (“Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her”).

Previous winners of the prize include Giles Coren, Morrissey and Norman Mailer. Coren, who described male genitalia “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath”, acknowledged his win with good humour, announcing of the shortlist: “I wish I’d written them all.” However, many authors have refused to collect their award, including Morrissey, who called the prize “evil”, and the late Tom Wolfe, who won for a passage in I Am Charlotte Simmons that included the line “slither slither slither slither went the tongue”.

“There’s an old saying: ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing,’” Wolfe told Reuters at the time. “In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.”

The award, which aims to “draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”, was presented in Frey’s absence by the singer Kim Wilde at London’s In and Out club.

In the award’s 25-year history, only three women – Rachel Johnson, Nancy Huston and Wendy Perriam – have won. But the Literary Review’s Frank Brinkley would not “officially” admit that women wrote better sex scenes than men. “There has been some great bad sex from women in the past but this year men are the prime offenders,” he told the Guardian. “There were a couple of women on the nominal longlist, which we don’t publish, but we decided they weren’t bad enough.”