Morrissey won it last year for referencing the “pained frenzy” of a “bulbous salutation”; Giles Coren triumphed with an extraordinary simile which had a male character’s genitalia “leaping around like a shower dropped in an empty bath”. The Bad sex in fiction award, that least desirable of literary prizes, is back, and this year former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis is in the running for the dubious honour.



The Literary Review, which set up the prize 23 years ago, announced this morning that Ellis’s debut novel The Butcher’s Hook, a dark, twisted story of a girl in 18th-century London, was one of six contenders for the award for “the most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction”. Ellis, who presented Blue Peter in the 1980s, drew praise for the debut when it was published – “a cross between Fanny Burney’s Evelina and US crime drama Dexter,” found the Observer. But the panel of five judges at the Literary Review singled it out for a surprisingly agricultural passage in which Ellis’s heroine Anne consummates her passion for butcher’s apprentice Fub.

“‘Anne,’ he says, stopping and looking down at me. I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. ‘Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better.’ He sways and we listen to the soft suck at the exact place we meet. Then I move and put all thoughts of livestock out of his head.”

Ellis is perhaps the biggest name on a shortlist which will leave many of literature’s luminaries sighing in relief to have been overlooked. The Literary Review said that while the award-winning authors Ian McEwan and Eimear McBride had both been nominated by readers, for their latest novels Nutshell and The Lesser Bohemians, they “failed to make the grade”.

“Several” passages from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Here I Am also caught the judges’ attention, the magazine added, with lines such as: “He jerked off with the determination of someone within sight of Everest’s summit, having lost all his friends and Sherpas, having run out of supplemental oxygen, but preferring death to failure.” But Foer’s writing about sex was ultimately found to be not “egregious” enough.

Donald Trump, the Literary Review added, was also nominated by “several” readers for his “locker-room talk”, but judges decided that “this had to be discounted on the grounds that the award only covers fiction”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fervent … Ethan Canin Photograph: Nina Subin

Instead, American author Ethan Canin was picked for a passage from his novel A Doubter’s Almanac which runs heavy on the similes: “During sex she would quiet, moving suddenly on top of him like a lion over its prey ... The act itself was fervent. Like a brisk tennis game or a summer track meet, something performed in daylight between competitors.”

A spokesperson for the judges said that some of the nominated extracts “fall into the classic bad sex mistake of overwriting, with mixed metaphors, uncomfortable similes, or becoming so hyperbolic they strains credulity”.

Austrian author Robert Seethaler was chosen for a passage from his bestselling The Tobacconist, set in 1937 Austria, in which “as his trousers slipped down his legs all the burdens of his life to date seemed to fall away from him; he tipped back his head and faced up into the darkness beneath the ceiling, and for one blessed moment he felt as if he could understand the things of this world in all their immeasurable beauty”.

“It takes itself too seriously,” said the spokesperson. “That’s another category that can come up: you can detect a little bit of preciousness on the part of the author when he - and it’s normally a he - gets to the deed itself.”

American novelist Gayle Forman made the shortlist for an extract from Leave Me, which is heavy on Madonna references – judges believe unintentionally – and European prize for literature winner Erri de Luca for one from The Day Before Happiness, about an orphan boy growing up in Naples. “My whole body had gone inside her,” writes de Luca at one point. “The detail of what’s happening gets so out of control it’s very hard to make head or tail of it,” said the judge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest That airport feeling … featured in Tom Connolly’s Men Like Air. Photograph: RuslanDashinsky/Getty Images/iStockphoto

Tom Connolly’s Men Like Air completes this year’s line-up, selected for its perfunctory airport sex scene: “He watched her passport rise gradually out of the back pocket of her jeans in time with the rhythmic bobbing of her buttocks as she sucked him. He arched over her back and took hold of the passport before it landed on the pimpled floor. Despite the immediate circumstances, human nature obliged him to take a look at her passport photo.”

The judge said the passage made it on to the list “because we’re looking for redundant passages, and that sex scene is a set up so one of the characters can see the passport of another and find out she has another name than he thought. The scaffolding of the plot is so obvious.”

He added that judges had also been struck by the “incredible” length of the male character’s arms. “Sometimes anatomy goes a little bit wrong for a writer who’s trying to do too many things at once,” he said.

The bad sex award, described as for an author who has “produced an outstandingly bad scene of sexual description in an otherwise good novel” is intended to highlight, and thus discourage, “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction”. Given that the prize has been running since 1993, when it was established by literary critic Rhoda Koenig and Literary Review editor Auberon Waugh, it does not appear to be having its desired effect.

Bad sex award 2016: the contenders in quotes Read more

This year’s winner will be announced on 30 November. Whether or not they will show up to collect their prize is unknown. Last year Morrissey, who won for a passage from his debut novel List of the Lost – “the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone” – did not attend the ceremony and later spoke of how he felt it “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”.

Tom Wolfe, who won in 2004 for a scene from I Am Charlotte Simmons said that judges had failed to understand the irony in his writing. “There’s an old saying - ‘You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her sing,’” he said at the time. “In this case, you can lead an English literary wannabe to irony but you can’t make him get it.”