The first thing that arises out of the nominations for this year's bad sex awards – the excruciating writing highlighted by the Literary Review each year – is just how fecund their writers' imaginations are. If they have done half the things they have ascribed to their characters, their spectacles must have steamed up.

There are agile tongues, rooms that begin to shake, warm wet caves, volcanic releases, moist meat, bottomless swamps of dead fish and yellow lilies in bloom and cellars filled with a heady store of wines and spirits emitting wafts of gaseous bouquets. And that is before you get to massaging, kneading, stretching, rubbing, pinching, flicking, feathering, licking, kissing and gently biting – which occurs in just one sentence thanks to David Guterson.

Now in their 19th year, the awards have shortlisted 12 authors before the presentation next month, among them some of the most distinguished – or at least bestselling – authors in the world. They come from Britain, the US, Hungary, Japan and Australia.

Among them is the monarch of horror, Stephen King, who may not have realised when he wrote in his new novel 11.22.63 "she leaned back and her head bonked on the door", that bonking has a more ribald meaning in the UK.

Haruki Murakami, author of the 1Q84 trilogy, might also have thought better of calling one of his female characters Fukaeri.

The Literary Review said: "In a year in which literary awards have come under fire for parochialism and dumbing down [we are] proud to uphold and recognise literary excellence from around the world ... The purpose of the prize is to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel and to discourage it."

Just two of the novelists on the list are women: Jean Auel, the 75-year-old author of the prehistoric Earth's Children series, and Dori Ostermiller.

Most off-putting may be the description by Christos Tsiolkas, the Australian author of The Slap, in his novel Dead Europe, which may not be suitable even for a Guardian reader's breakfast table; and most succinct must be Chris Adrian in the San Francisco-set The Great Night: "Now they fucked in earnest, which seemed like the right thing to do."

The Literary Review says there is still time for more nominations before the awards ceremony at London's Naval and Military Club, appropriately known as the In and Out, on 6 December.

A scene from Stephen King's 11.22.63

"She said, "Don't make me wait, I've had enough of that," and so I kissed the sweaty hollow of her temple and moved my hips forward ... She gasped, retreated a little, then raised her hips to meet me. "Sadie? All right?"

"Ohmygodyes," she said and I laughed. She opened her eyes and looked up at me with curiosity and hopefulness. "Is it over, or is there more?"

"A little more," I said. "I don't know how much. I haven't been with a woman in a long time."

It turned out there was quite a bit more … At the end she began to gasp. "Oh dear, oh my dear, oh my dear dear God, oh sugar!"