The Bad Sex Award reached its climax on Tuesday night with singer Morrissey’s reference to a “bulbous salutation” in his debut novel helping him win the bad sex award.



Sex scenes in his book List of the Lost swayed the judges, it was announced at a lavish ceremony presented by Nancy Dell’Olio on Tuesday.

Established in 1993 by the Literary Review’s then editor, Auberon Waugh, the aim of the Bad Sex in Fiction awards is to draw attention to “poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction” with the hope of discouraging them.

The former Smiths vocalist’s first novel - he produced an autobiography in 2013 – was published by Penguin in September to negative reviews. It tells the story of four Boston relay runners who are cursed by an old man in the woods.

A scene involving Ezra, one of the athletes, and his girlfriend, Eliza, caught the attention of the judges and was the favourite to win when the shortlist was announced last month.

The scene in question reads: “At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and 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.”

The shortlist included The Martini Shot, by the celebrated screenwriter of The Wire, George Pelecanos (“I rubbed myself against her until she was wet as a waterslide”); Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers (“her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop”); and Before, During, After by Richard Bausch (“When she took him, still a little flaccid, into her mouth, he moaned, ‘Oh, lover’”).

Morrissey, who follows in the footsteps of Melvyn Bragg, Rachel Johnson and Sebastian Faulks in winning the backhanded honour, was unable to attend due to touring commitments. He was also unavailable for comment.

